Louisville, Colorado-based Storage Technology Corp’s disk announcements anticipating the IBM 3990s that never came (CI No 1,207) include an enhanced version of the 8380R disk subsystem, a new 8380 model and the new 4080 solid state product, plus a two or four-director 8900 cached control unit. The 4080 provides two to eight storage directors, from 64Mb to 1.152Mb of dynamic memory storage, 3380 or 3370 emulation and the ability to configure up to 16 logical volumes. A battery/winchester disk backup system is standard, offering data protection for unscheduled power outages, making it sound very like the new Amdahl 6110. The new 8900 control unit can be configured with two or four directors and dual-port 8380 disks are supported by the two-director 8900. The four-director 8900 supports the new 8380RQ drives, and StorageTek says the product is designed to meet the needs of applications such as DB2 that need large amounts of cache to provide stability in performance. The 8900, StorageTek’s answer to the 3990, comes with up to 256Mb of cache. The new 8380RQ disk subsystem is quad-ported, offering additional pathing for higher input-output rates, complementing the performance benefits of the company’s existing Actuator Level Buffer option. The new design will continue to provide the intermix of single-, double- and triple-capacities, and users can take their pick of the 8880 four-director controller or the new 8900 control unit with the quad-ported 8380RQ. The 8380F Disk Storage Subsystem is a two-spindle, standard configuration unit with triple-capacity head-disk assemblies to give 1.89Gb of storage capacity per actuator or 3.78Gb of storage capacity per spindle or 7.56Gb per unit. The planned Intelligent Information Manager controller that is still in development is to be the company’s full answer to the 3990, and is being designed to be compatible with the IBM controller, but to add unpsecified functionality. The two-director, 64Mb 4080 solid-state device is $120,000; a 256Mb four-director, quad-ported system is $349,200; a 768Mb eight-director system is $948,400. The minimum quad-port configuration of the 8900 is $175,000; a 60Gb 8380RQ is $905,500; and a 7.56Gb 8380F is $96,000. The 8380F and 4080 will be available in the fourth quarter of 1989. The 8380RQ and 8900 are scheduled for the first half of 1990. The Intelligent Information is planned for first customer shipments in 1991.
