Just one day after Storage Technology Corp jumped into the IBM Corp RS/6000 tape drive market (CI No 1,811), Waltham, Massachusetts based IPL Systems Inc followed suit, including disk subsystems as well as tape drives for the IBM Unix workstation. The company is offering 3000 Series 8mm carridge tape subsystems and 4000 Series disk subsystems, with proprietary IPL software drivers that implement IBM’s error diagnostics and recovery routines. The company says it will ship to third party distributors by the end of the year, but gave no configuration details or prices. And already in the IBM AS/400 storage market, IPL has added the 6748 tape drive, a 9348-compatible reel-to-reel unit for B, C, and D models. It has a tape speed of 125ips with a transfer rate of 781Kbytes per second. Operating in 1,600 or 6,250 bits per inch modes, it has a 1Mb cache and local diagnostics that can be run from the front panel; again it is compatible with error correction and diagnostic routines supported by the AS/400. Out now, the 6748 is $16,500, 27% below list on IBM’s 9348. IPL aleady offers half inch cartridge, 8mm and reel-to-reel drives for use with the AS/400.
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