Archive Corp, in process of completing the long-disputed acquisition of Cipher Data Products Inc, has merged its data storage division and European distributors with Maynard Electronics, acquired in February last year (CI No 1,116). The merged operations are now called Archive/Maynard, and headquartered in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire. The company has announced availability of its MaynStream 1300DAT tape back up system with MaynStream Version 2.51 software, and has consolidated its tape backup products for Apple Macintosh under the Maxstream name. The digital audio tape device has 1.3Gb capacity on a 4mm digital audio cassette tape, and is compatible with Novell NetWare 286 and NetWare 386, Token Ring, 3Com 3Net, and MS-DOS. It has an average seek time of 20 seconds and it implements 10 error handling techniques including three levels of error correction code. The software can back up open files and performs byte to byte verify of hard disk to tape data. The 1300DAT is available this month and costs $2,500 in the US, but UK prices are set by the company’s distributors. MaxStream tape backup systems for the Apple Mac offer storage capacities of 60Mb, 150Mb, and 2.2Gb. MaxStream Scheduler, a control panel device, is included with MaxStream 2.0, and when combined with scripts, provides automatic unattended backups. Current users can upgrade to Version 2.0 at no cost. The acquisition of Cipher Data Products Inc at $8.25 a share, to be finalised on April 2, has raised a few eyebrows in the storage world. According to Electronic News, Archive spent $8m on the takeover campaign, and it will cost an additional $114m to acquire the remaining 13.8m shares. Cipher will broaden Archive’s product line with Irwin 3.5 drives and optical drives from Optimem, which Cipher acquired from Xerox. However, observers are concerned that the cost of acquiring loss-making Cipher will burden the enlarged company with debt. There is also a great deal of duplication between the two companies’ manufacturing and distribution operations, and there are suggestions that of the two manufacturing plants in Singapore, Cipher’s will be the one that closes. Over the next month, senior executives of both companies are embarking on a worldwide tour to assess what measures are necessary to integrate operations and stop the rot at Cipher, which after several profitable years plunged into losses in the past six months.
