Having decided to use 5.25 disk drives bought OEM from Hewlett-Packard Co rather than building its own in its forthcoming disk array (CI No 1,430), Storage Technology Corp has turned to Tandem Computers Inc’s Array Technology Corp acquisition for integration of the subsystems. The Louisville, Colorado company will buy the disk array subsystems OEM from Array, which will develop the software and hardware subsystems around the Hewlett-Packard disks to create the RAID Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks – for launch in 1991. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed. The parity approach to RAID technology, used by the two companies, is claimed to offer high levels of availability at low cost with minimal overhead. StorageTek and Array subsystems based on RAID provide the ability to gain access automatically to a hot standby spare if a drive fails and to reconstruct the data on a spare drive to provide varying degrees of performance options and redundancy, including mirroring. Storage Technology is a transformed company since it emerged from bankruptcy protection, taking a cautious and cost-efficient approach to everything it does, and greatly reducing its dep endence on IBM by making its key products available for use with a wide range of proprietary and Unix systems. It has also been running rings around IBM with its robotic library system for cartridge tapes.
