Denver, Colorado-based Emass Inc is one of the first companies to announce a product based on the Magstar tape drive that IBM Corp launched in April (CI No 2,641) as part of IBM’s bid to recapture the tape storage market it has lost to Storage Technology Corp. Emass’s addition to the serpentine, longitudinal tape technology, is the integration with its robotic devices, which it says can be used with any type of drive. The robotics come from Grau Storage Systems GmbH, Stuttgart, Germany; Emass bought the company in October 1994 and markets its products in Europe under the Grau name. Emass says it will not be selling the Magstar as a stand-alone drive; rather what it is calling the Emass 8590 family will be configured with Emass’s automated media libraries including the AML/2, AML/E and AML/J; any installed AML libraries can be field-upgraded with the 8590 drives. The new medium, being supplied by Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing Co from its labs in Tuscon, Arizona, is an ultra-durable evaporated metal particle evaporated formulation, with 128 tracks. Without compression, each cartridge, which has the same dimensions as 3480 tapes, holds 10Gb of data, with, 40Gb. This means that one of Emass’s Quadratower storage module attached to an AML/E or AML/2 library can accommodate up to 57.6Tb. The high-end AML/2 library can be configured with up to eight Quadratowers for a total near-line capacity of 460Tb. For entry-level storage, the AML/J offers up to 45Tb of capacity. IBM has been calculating some cost comparison between 3490E drives and the Magstar drive, when attached to a 3494 library. With two 3490E drives, and 610 cartridge slots, the system has a maximum capacity of 488Gb, and the cost is ú0.32 per Megabyte. With two Magstars, 610 slots, the maximum capacity is 1,464Gb, and the cost is ú0.10 per Megabyte. Exactly the same configurations but using 3:1 compression yield 6.1Tb maximum storage for the 3490E at a cost of ú0.03 per Mb, and 18.3Tb as ú0.01 per Mb for the Magstar. Although IBM says that in reality a Magstar configuration would have less drives. Emass will, like IBM, offer an SCSI version first, next quarter, and Escon in 1996.
