Tandem Computers Inc is now assiduously donwsizing to its core business, and another asset now regarded as surplus to requirements is its Array Technology Corp disk array integrator acquisition in Boulder, Colorado. Array Technology writes the software and builds to controllers to create RAID disk arrays, and its most visible product is the Alpine disk array for the IBM Corp AS/400, which is marketed by Storage Technology Corp. The Alpine uses disk drives bought OEM from Hewlett-Packard Co and integrated with MIPS Technologies Inc R3000-based controllers. The business is going to the current king of the disk array heap, Hopkinton, Massachusetts-based EMC Corp, which has signed a letter of intent to acquire the assets of the business for less that $10m cash. The acquisition includes more than 20 patents on disk array technology already held by or filed by Array. EMC is a long-time partner of StorageTek, manufacturing solid state mass storage for ES/9000s which is marketed by StorageTek – but StorageTek also has a dispute with EMC over cache memory technologies.
