US storage newcomer Ecrix Corp expects to announce OEM deals shortly for its VXA-1 tape drives, based on a technology which it claims will deliver capacities and data rates of disk at much lower cost than competing tape technologies.
Kelly Beavers, president of the Boulder, Colorado-based company, said the first OEM partners will probably be European or Japanese file server manufacturers, as negotiations with US companies promise to be more protracted. In the meantime, Ecrix is working through industrial distribution channels such as Bell Microsystems in the States, CMS Peripherals in the UK and MainStore in Germany to reach resellers, integrators and white box manufacturers with its drive which began shipping in May.
VXA is a helical scan technology like those used by Exabyte Corp and Sony Corp, but is the only media not to be read by a streamer, Beavers explained. Instead, he said, it relies on an innovative technique of ‘packets’ of information read by overscanning, with a drum passing many times over the tape and reading them innumerable times to reduce the error rate. This system also avoids the problems caused to both linear (DLT) and helical scan drives by tension on the tape, he said.
Beavers, a founder of Exabyte, joined forces with StorageTek founder Juan Rodriguez to start Ecrix in 1996, and spent the next two years developing the technology. They have completed three rounds of venture financing totaling $36.5m, said Beavers, adding that he is in negotiations with a further potential investor for another $7m. The drives designed by Ecrix are manufactured in Japan by Aiwa Ltd, who then sell them to the US company, which adds a 25%-35% mark-up and markets them.
