Last time around, before the Great Fall – into long and grinding Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings – Storage Technology Corp clung desperately onto IBM Corp’s coat-tails, never bringing out a new generation of tape or disk drives until their characteristics and capabilities had been blessed by IBM with its own product. This time around, things are different. IBM is not the force for dictating standards that it used to be, and encouraged by the runaway success of the NearLine automated tape library, a product for which IBM still doesn’t have an answer, StorageTek is prepared to do the hitherto unthinkable and beat IBM to market with a new concept in mainframe disk drives. IBM’s problem, as we have highlighted earlier, is that the price-performance of 5.25 and 3.5 OEM disk drives makes its own 14 and 10 manhole covers look like relics from another age. IBM has been swithering for three or four years now over whether to bring out an array disk subsystem for mainframes – on the original schedule it would have been out by now – but so far has been deterred by the unfavourable economics: big disk drives generate almost as much profit as the mainframes to which they are attached. Now, however, it is likely to have its hand forced: StorageTek is ready to launch its Iceberg redundant array of inexpensive disks without waiting for IBM to tell the world that the concept is acceptable, and plans to launch the product early next year. We can’t afford to let IBM do our product planning any more, StorageTek vice-president Michael Klatman told Computerworld, adding that the company chose to skip the 3390 generation of disk drives altogether, and believes that the Iceberg array will prove an attractive alternative to 3390. The Iceberg will use 16 of the 5.25 disk drives StorageTek is buying OEM from Hewlett-Packard Co, and three or four of them act as global spares to provide fault-tolerance; data is not permanently mirrored although a proprietary writing mechanism ensures that data is not lost if a disk fails. There is only 15% to 20% redundance. And as with the tape library, StorageTek will again declare its conversion to the belief that there is life beyond IBM: although the first version of Iceberg will be for IBM mainframes, versions for other machines will follow, with Unix server machines likely to be high on the list.
