Storage Technology Corp finally takes the wraps off its Iceberg disk array for IBM Corp mainframe users tomorrow, Tuesday, and excitement has built up so much ahead of the launch that the shares have put on $20 to around $60 since the end of 1991: the company says that it has pre-sold its entire projection of $50m in sales in 1992, and that it is going to have to put customers on allocation for the first 2,000 machines, which it says will take it through to the end of 1994; if the company has got the internal microcode right to ensure that the redundant striping features work, it should make money out of the disk system eventually, but that it is effectively trying to solve two enormous programming problems in one – one to get the RAID software to work correctly, the other to emulate the IBM Corp 3990 controller exactly, because unless MVS can talk to the subsystem as if it were a 3990-3390 combination, users will not want to buy the thing – and IBM is likely to launch a new disk controller soon.
