Having been the one that originally conceived the idea of replacing its beloved manhole cover storage devices – the vast 14 platters it used in its mainframe disk subsystems – with an array of cheap OEM disk drives, IBM Corp yesterday threw in the towel on the business and handed design and manufacturing over to Storage Technology Corp. StorageTek will in turn hand over marketing of the devices to IBM, so that from July 1, the names Iceberg, Kodiak and Arctic Fox disappear, and IBM unaccountably attaches the name of what is perceived in the market as a failed product line to the successor products: Iceberg becomes IBM Ramac Virtual Array Storage, Kodiak becomes Ramac Scalable Array Storage and Arctic Fox, Ramac Electronic Array Storage. Kodiak and Arctic Fox are the fruits of StorageTek’s Amperif Corp acquisition: Kodiak is a RAID Level 5 device for smaller mainframes, Arctic Fox is an array for Parallel Sysplex systems. IBM implies that it will continue to market its existing Ramac arrays, but these are not expected to survive for very long. From July 1, new sales will carry an IBM logo and will be sold and serviced by IBM; StorageTek will continue to service installed devices it sold prior to the agreement. StorageTek uses Hewlett-Packard Co drives in its arrays but said yesterday it will integrate IBM’s disk drives into its products over time, but a spokesperson could not confirm whether it would have to break any sort of contract with HP to do so. StorageTek uses Hewlett-Packard Co drives in its arrays, but is to integrate IBM technology, especially IBM’s disk drives, into these products over time. It was saying yesterday that the switch would be almost immediate. IBM also will fund future product enhancements. The agreement, hints of which began appearing as early as January last year (CI No 2,583), makes IBM and StorageTek partners in disk storage but they
remain rivals in tape storage. StorageTek would not rule out layoffs but did not expect any significant reduction in staff, and said the agreement would result in some shifting about of employees. StorageTek said currently two-thirds of its business is tape storage and 20% is direct access disks.
