Extending an eleven-year-old original equipment manufacturer agreement, Tandberg Data ASA is to equip IBM Corp’s recently launched e-system and e-server models of the AS/400 with its Multichannel Linear Recording 1 tape drives. The companies first starting working together in 1986, with Tandberg providing IBM with its Quick 120Mb drives for low-end AS/400s, progressing over the years to 2.5Gb drives and to the MRL1 drives today. The Norwegian company, which has its US headquarters in Simi Valley, California, says the MLR1 is a 32Gb capacity data storage system designed to achieve faster data capacity levels and transfer rates on quarter inch tape drives. Tandberg introduced the MLR1 towards the end of last year (CI No 3,053). The new deal extends the use of Tandberg drives from the low-end to more powerful AS/400 systems for the first time. Other Tandberg OEM customers include Siemens Nixdorf Informationssyteme AG, Toshiba Corp, Digital Equipment Corp, Data General Corp and Sun Microsystems Inc. Last month, the company extended its agreement with Sun, supplying it with its older SLR5 drives.
