Now that it’s been out of the shadow of the rest of IBM Corp’s storage systems division for one year, IBM’s removable media storage solutions unit launched new products yesterday, vowing to increase profits by 20% next year. Removable media – what most of us remember by its old fashioned name: tape and optical storage – was spun out in September of last year, when IBM split its storage business into four groups. Although its revenues are still significantly smaller than, say, its disk cousin’s sales, IBM plans to reap significant rewards this year by expanding its tape automation subsystem, the Magstar Multi-Purpose, to Sun, HP and SGI Unixes, NT and Netware platforms this month. It currently works with RS/6000 and AS/400 systems. It’s priced at about $15,000 for a one drive library and $23,000 for a two drive library due out in March of next year. Also announced yesterday was the Magstar Virtual Tape Server, a storage management system that uses volume stacking and virtual tape drives which IBM claims will result in an almost 60 to one reduction in the number of cartridges a user must buy. The server ships for $180,000 for use with the IBM 3494 Tape Library this month and the 3495 in November. IBM also announced an integrated bundle of its exising hardware and software products which supports about 30 operating systems, called the 3466 Network Storage Manager. The system can back up 40Tb of data across networks and enables users to back up and restore files through Internet browsers and private intranets. IBM will begin selling media for all its products so that users could get everything they need from Big Blue instead of 3M or other firms. Big Blue says the initiative is not just a loss exercise to please users but expects to turn a decent profit from selling media within two years. IBM estimates it has an installed base of 6,000 for its Magstar tape drives.
