Data General Corp says that in Dell Computer Corp it has certainly picked up a revenue stream that should more than offset any decline in sales of its Clariion storage to Hewlett-Packard Co. Wall Street hardware watchers think it unlikely DG will win HP as an OEM for the newer generation Fibre Channel technologies (CI No 3,556). However Clariion managers say that DG is still pursuing additional business opportunities with HP and as far as they are concerned HP has made no decision yet on its long-term storage strategy. The question is do we get married again? it asks. In the meantime, DG has added an OLTP-oriented 5703 controller to its Fibre Channel product line. It can support between ten and thirty 9Gb or 18Gb drives and is priced at $35,000 in the base configuration, or less than $0.40 per Mb, the company claims. The new controller performs at some 22,000 I/O operations per array versus the 5500 controller’s 14,000. DG says that it in 1999 it will pursue a more aggressive software strategy, which has never been as big a deal to it as it is to other storage vendors, both in-house work and through partnerships.
