When Unisys Corp liberated its Memorex unit in a management buyout that led to the creation of Memorex Telex International NV, it hung on to the core of the old Memorex, the high-end disk drive manufacturing business in Santa Clara, California. Unisys has now decided that it doesn’t need that either, and has agreed to sell it to the management – raising questions about the future of the business. Unisys also has disk drive plants in Manitoba and in Singapore, which are not included in the buy-out, and according to Memorex Telex, while Santa Clara still does development work with Memorex, and also repairs its 3890 IBM-compatible mainframe disk drives come from the Unisys plant in Sigapore. The Santa Clara plant still makes the 9710 disk subsystems for the Unisys A-series and V-series mainframes and an ageing 94094-24 subsystem for the 1100s, but is due to produce a drive for use with the new 2200 series mainframes shortly. The plant will need the guarantee of continuing business if it is to attract venture capital to back the buyout, and according to Computer Systems News, it is not at all clear that Unisys plans to make a long-term commitment to the new drives for the 2200. One source told the paper that Unisys planned to build a subsystem using 16 1Gb 8 drives from Fujitsu Ltd for the 2200s, and Unisys said it was too early to comment on what drives it would continue to buy from the new company, which lost much of its business when the manufacturing for Memorex Telex moved to Singapore.
