By William Fellows
In a bid to increase sales of their respective tape library and management products, Storage Technology Corp and Veritas Software Inc are creating an new set of removable storage interfaces they claim will for the first time enable Unix, NT, mainframe and other applications to access the same tape libraries. StorageTek will ship the software in the form of a media server for Unix and NT and hopes it will spur sales of its TimberWolf tape systems in the open systems market. Veritas will gradually replace its existing Media Librarian tape backup technology – which it admits it’s had trouble getting vendors to support – with the new APIs (which will be compatible with it). It is positioning the initiative as a shot across the bows of arch rival Legato Systems Inc and its rival SmartMedia tape management environment, which is based on Silicon Graphics Inc OpenVault technology. The new APIs will support StorageTek’s existing ACS library management interfaces via a bridge the company will develop and therefore the 33-odd vendors which already support ACS, as well as Microsoft Corp’s RMS removable storage manager. StorageTek will also continue to develop native versions of ACS for RMS and SmartMedia. The APIs will operate as a layer between the tape libraries and applications. Although its disk interests are growing, tape and libraries still represent 75% of the $2.26bn revenue it has recorded in the last 12 months. Three years ago it had no open systems tape products. StorageTek estimates that tape libraries represent around 10% of the overall cost of a large open systems solution these days, whereas storage accounts for around 50% of total system cost. First cut of the APIs are due by mid-year as a Lite version supporting SCSI libraries and ACS. RSM and Nearline support is due by year-end along with a web-based GUI. Support for high-end vaults doesn’t happen until next year, along with storage area networks and device arbitration. StorageTek, which is currently readying a new generation of TimberWolf products is also offering a new TimberWolf library monitor to enable customers to monitor StorageTek libraries via CA Unicenter or HP OpenView management frameworks. A second cut of the software due by mid-year will support the Tivoli management environment. By year-end it will offer on-board library agents, integration with the new media server APIs – or whatever StorageTek and Veritas name them – high-end Nearline libraries and pass-thru library representation.
