Hewlett-Packard Co is progressively going through its business units, applying the techniques that have made it the runaway front-runner in the non-impact printer stakes and giving each of the core ones a higher profile. Latest for the treatment is the storage business. The company does not believe its profile is nearly as high as it should be in the reseller storage peripherals business, and it is taking energetic steps to rectify the situation. The company says that its information storage business has been growing four times faster than the industry sector as a whole, and expects it to contribute $1,500m to group turnover this fiscal year. To give it a higher profile, the information storage business changes its name to the Information Storage Group from the Mass Storage Group, reflecting the intention to offer complete, integrated, read-do-go information storage subsystems, and all storage products sold through resellers are to carry one family name, SureStore. SureStore products must pass a seven-step qualification process that ensure that the same high performance, ease of use, and warranty standards have been met. The first products to carry the SureStore name are the HP SureStoreOptical 20xt LAN Jukebox, the HP SureStoreTape 12000e tape drive, and the HP SureStoreDisk drives. The first is a network-ready 20Gb subsystem that connects at any place on the network, initially in Unix-based Network File System environments. It costs $13,000 from November 1. The second is a digital audio tape subsystem offered with an autoloader for six cartridges, bundled with back-up software from Palindrome Corp. The basic SureStore Tape 12000e – C1561A autoloader costs $3,650 and the HP SureStore Tape 12000e LABS for NetWare is $4,650, November again. And the first two disks are 3.5 HP SureStore 1000S and 2000S drives, with 1.05Gb and 2.1Gb of storage. They have 9.5mS and 8.9mS seek times. They are available from authorised distributors, who will set prices.
