IPL Systems Inc, Waltham, Massachusetts has a new rack-mountable, half-inch cartridge tape drive, the 6890, which can be mixed and matched with other drives in the company’s 6800 series on a single controller. The 6800 series includes a 6820 half-inch, reel-to-reel tape drive and a 6860 8mm cartridge drive with helical scan technology. Needless to say, the 6890 is to the IBM 3480 standard for tape drives and is described as comparable with IBM’s new 3490. It attaches to the IBM AS/400 via IBM’s 2604 feature, which accommodates up to four tape drives, is also compatible with the System/38, 9370 and 4300 systems and can attach to any 370-compatible channel. It records data on 18 tracks at a nominal data rate of 3Mbytes-per-second. An optional cartridge stack loader that holds up to five 10 cartridges and provides up to 2Gb of storage is available as part of the tape subsystem. With data compression, standard on the 2604 feature, up to 4Gb can be stored during a single, unattended operation. The 6890 will be available this quarter, and it can be installed in an IPL 6809 39 rack or an IBM 9309 five foot rack. A 6890 A01 with external controller and one cartridge drive is $45,900; the 6890 A02 consists of an external controller and two drives for $69,900; the 6890 B01 includes an add-on half-inch cartridge drive for $35,900; and the 6890 B02 with drives sells for $59,900. And XL/Datacomp Inc has signed to buy the 6860 for use in its disaster recovery centres for IBM’s System/38 and AS/400. Initial locations for the 6860s will include XL’s regional hot sites in Alsip, Illinois and Springfield, New Jersey; XL will also distribute the 6860 subsystem.
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