Digital Equipment Corp has moved its StorageWorks range of storage products onto Sun Microsystems Inc and Novell Inc NetWare servers as part of a raft of new product releases. The company, which originally rolled out StorageWorks in May last year (CI No 2,167), admits that the products have always been compatible with Sun and NetWare systems, but it wanted to prequalify them before it told anyone. Now Sun users can buy 1.05Gb and 2.1Gb 3.5 drives for UKP1,293 and UKP1,784 respectively. A 5.25 3.57Gb drive costs UKP2,996, A 5.25 solid state SCSI store with 107Mb capacity costs UKP10,760 while a 428Mb store in the same format costs UKP37,970. For users wanting to feel more secure, a 5.25Gb RAID array will cost UKP10,620 while double that capacity will cost UKP15,370. A 600Mb CD-ROM drive will set you back UKP750, while the 6mm Digital Audio Tape drive for Sparcsystems will set you back UKP1,717 – don’t go looking in any cereal packets for that one. As part of its recent client-server push, DEC has also been working hard on behalf of the NetWare user base. The firm has conseqently channelled its products into NetWare in a bid to tap the market. Now NetWare users can fill their shopping trolleys with a 1.05Gb SCSI disk costing UKP1,020, a 2.1Gb disk costing UKP1,900, a 4Gb DAT tape drive costing UKP1,716, while the StorageWorks 16Gb tape drive will sell for UKP4,520. A Helical Scan 10Gb compressed tape drive in a 5.25 case will lighten your pocket by UKP2,621. A 6Gb 800K-byte-per-second DLT tape drive in a 5.25 form factor will cost UKP2,915. Users wanting more storage can buy a 19Gb SCSI jukebox with one 1.3Gb drive for UKP7,273 or a 38Gb model with two 1.3Gb drive for UKP15,290.

RAID options for NetWare users

There are also RAID options for NetWare users, which are priced according to configuration. A 5.25Gb array costs UKP10,620 for example. DEC also launched a number of products outside the Sun and Novell bonanza. The company has released a DSSI controller for the StorageWorks family, in the form of the HSD05 array controller. The HSD05 fills a 3.5 form factor and enables SCSI kit to hook up to DSSI clusters – up to seven SCSI devices can connect to a DSSI port through the controller. The controller costs UKP2,087. Also launched were two CD-ROM drives, the RRD43 and RRD44 units. The drives support architectures including CD-ROM/XA, Multisession, PhotoCD, MPC one and two, Philips Electronics NV’s Compact Disk-Interactive and the CD-Digital Audio standards. The RRD34 drive has an access time of 320mS against the RRD44’s 200mS drive. The both drives have transfer rates of 150K-bytes per second, and 300Kbps, while the RRD44 also has a 330Kbps transfer rate for multimedia files, along with a 256Kb cache. The RRD43MX for DEC 4000 units costs UKP295. Both drives are available for OpenVMS on VAX and AXP, and OSF/1. Ultrix versions will ship in early April. On the solid state side, DEC has launched the EZ58R SCSI solid state store, available now. The disk stores 856Mb, and costs UKP73,980. There are two new tape drive model. The TZ87 20Gb DLT tape drive and its brother the TZ877 autoloader now support more systems on OpenVMS AXP V1.5, DEC OSF/1 V1.3b OpenVMS VAX V5.5-2, and Ultrix V4.3A. The TZ87 tape drive costs UKP5,420 for DEC 4000 systems. There is also a tape library, the TL820, which provides up to 5.2Tb of storage. Additional tower units can be added to the system to handle up to 26Terabytes of data. Initially supporting OpenVMS AXP, VMS and OSF/1, there is custom pricing only for the system which will ship in three-four months. DEC’s new TURBOchannel to SCSI adaptor, called the KZTSA, is designed to link up peripherals to a SCSI-2 bus while reducing load on the CPU. It costs UKP2,505.