With storage becoming more and more strategic to computer vendors, Sequent Computer Systems Inc has announced a worldwide strategic relationship with Storage Technology Corp under which Sequent will resell StorageTek’s TimberWolf 9710 digital tape library with its NUMAQ 2000 servers. The deal will be good news to StorageTek, which last year claimed that by shifting its focus away from traditional IBM Corp mainframe storage to the NT and Unix market, it could significantly increase its revenues (CI No 3,251). In December, it signed its biggest OEM deal to date for the TimberWolf libraries with Hewlett-Packard Co (CI No 3,310). The TimberWolf 9710 offers from 600Gb to 20.58Tb data storage, and Sequent says its customers have been demanding such systems for their high availability mission-critical applications. Sequent says it has been reselling the Storagetek product for some time and along with EMC Corp products, these give it a very strong high-end systems story. The company has seen considerable success with its NUMA Non-Uniform Memory servers, in spite of their being more expensive than rival offerings from the likes of Data General Corp. Last July it announced a $59m deal with Boeing Co, in which the aircraft manufacturer bought a 20-node system with tape libraries from StorageTek and disk farms from EMC Corp (CI No 3,203). StorageTek says the Sequent deal in no way equals the Hewlett-Packard deal in dollar terms, but is another step in its move towards open systems storage, which it sees as a rapidly growing part of its business.
