In spite of Compaq Computer Corp’s almost completed acquisition of Digital Equipment Corp and its StorageWorks storage business, Compaq has signed a major agreement with Storage Technology Inc, under which the two will work together on two initiatives aimed at scaling up Windows NT-based storage networks for enterprise systems. StorageTek won’t reveal the value of the deal, but says it’s comparable in size and scope to the partnership it struck up with IBM Corp back in 1996. StorageTek is said to have made around $1bn in revenues from the IBM deal, under which it took over the design and manufacturing for IBM’s Ramac storage business (CI No 2,931). Compaq holds the number one position in the supply of storage for NT-based systems according to International Data Corp figures, but its sales have been mostly at the low-end. The first initiative revolves around the use of fibre channel as a communications protocol, which will be an important option for storage communications, but only part of the picture, according to StorageTek general manager of the Networking Business Group for Europe, Middle East and Asia, Alastair Blackburn. The second will see StorageTek developing its MVS mainframe-based virtual storage technology for Windows NT. StorageTek’s existing virtual storage software is currently in beta, and is expected to come to market in the second half of this year. Compaq is basically funding the research and development on both these initiatives, with StorageTek carrying out the work to adapt its existing technology to the demands of enterprise level NT. Products for the storage area network, using fibre channel, should be available by the end of this year, Blackburn said, while the virtual storage initiative looks like being 12 to 18 months away. Both companies will sell products resulting from the research efforts. Despite its deal with IBM, StorageTek has been retreating from the shrinking mainframe storage market towards Windows NT, a market that’s exploding. But DEC’s Storageworks unit holds the number two slot in the market according to the IDC figures, and has been shipping fibre channel since February. In the quiet period before the merger is finalized, DEC was reluctant to comment on the StorageTek announcement, but did say it hadn’t come across StorageTek as an NT competitor to date. It said the timing of its own announcement, the certification of its RAID Array 7000 and 10000 subsystems by Microsoft Corp’s Hardware Quality Labs as NT 4.0 approved products was a coincidence, even though the accompanying press release boasted of its high-end credentials, such as the terabyte of storage it provided on the largest Windows NT server node in the world, demonstrated at the last Microsoft Corp scalability day, and Oracle Corp’s use of Storageworks in its development of terabyte-sized databases. DEC also has a large scale network storage system project, codenamed Petal, underway. Yesterday, DEC also began shipping its entry-level RAID Array 3000 storage subsystem for NT.
รก
