Sun Microsystems Inc is to include shock-protected chassis that enable Winchester disk drives to be removed from its workstations and stored in a safe place when not in use. The Data Shuttle 2000 chassis will be sold by Sun’s special products group marketing programme. The Shuttle comes from MDB Systems Ltd of Basingstoke, Hampshire, a designer of ruggedised computer systems, and was created specifically for Sun-2, -3 and -4 workstations: it enables one or two 5.25 disk drives – whichever ones customers happen to be using with their Suns, since MDB supplies only the chassis, not the drives – to be mounted in individually shock protected removable canisters. Membership of the special products group means the Shuttle will be supplied as an optional extra, with full technical and back up support provided by Sun.
