Now fully restored to financial health, albeit at rather smaller size than when it collapsed into bankruptcy and had to seek court protection from its creditors back in 1984, Storage Technology Corp is hard at work to win back its reputation as the company that was able to compete head to head with IBM in storage peripherals by virtue of superior technology. The company is tipped to come out in March or April with a fault-tolerant disk controller stuffed with cache memory that will offer the benefits of fast write and parallel write to two drives of the IBM 3990 Model 3, but with fewer limitations. The controller, code-name Iceberg, is reportedly being designed to handle both 14 and 5.25 disk drives, and solid state secondary storage, and to support remote head-of-string drives linked by a fibre optic cable. Also planned by the Louisville, Colorado firm for the first half of next year is a series of programs to complement IBM’s new DFSMS Data Facility Storage Management Subsystem, the program designed to take management of data on disk out of the hands of the adminstrator. StorageTek’s offerings are said to comprise Dynamic Cache Manager; Export DASD Manager; Data Manager; Disaster Manager; Capacity Planning Administrator; and Network Strategy Manager. Also in the works at the firm, under the code-name Yukon (they must have had a real cold snap recently in Louisville) is a version of the 4305 solid state store with much inceased capacity, for pagination and mirror disk.
