Dallas, Texas-based electronic defence contractor E-Systems Inc says Mobil Corp has installed the company’s first commercial mass data storage system for supercomputers, Emass, the New York Times reports. The commercial storage system is a 19mm helical scan tape device, developed in conjunction with Ampex Corp, Redwood, California (CI Nos 1,428, 1,520). The supercomputer server is compatible with Convex Computer Corp and Cray Research Inc machines. It takes just six tape cassettes, each roughly the size of a VHS video cassette, to store 1Tb of data, which the company says compares with around 5,000 cartridge reels in a competitive Storage Technology Corp mass-storage system. In all the Emass system takes a total of 227 tapes with capacity for 37.8Tb of data. The Emass robot – a robot stand with four arms, developed with Odetics Corp, Anaheim, California, which has come out with its own low-end 3480-type mass storage product (CI No 1,828), files and retrieves the data cartridges – selects tapes using a bar-code scanning device, then loads the cassettes into the computer’s tape drive – a process that takes around 30 seconds. The system is claimed to outperform StorageTek in processing speed by a ratio of five to one, though the E-Systems offering is more costly at $685,000 for a base model, compared with $440,000 for a typical StorageTek storage system. E-Systems’ commercial mass storage business, according to market analysts, will be slow going for the first few years. Prudential Securities military contracting analayst Byron Calan reckons sales of mass storage products will account for some $75m of E-Systems’ total revenues by 1994; the company is expected to report sales up 11% at $2,000m.
