Marking a major milestone in the welding of Burroughs and Sperry into a single entity, Unisys Corp last week announced customer shipments of its first peripheral that is designed to be used with both Sperry 1100 and Burroughs A and V series mainframes. The company notes that the provision of common peripherals for the various mainframe families has been a priority goal for Unisys. The product is a family of IBM 3480-class tape drives, and uses transports bought OEM from Fujitsu. The new model, dubbed the 5073/0899 cartridge tape subsystem, is designed to improve fixed disk back-up performance. It uses thin film heads, chromium dioxide cartridge media, and large data buffers as well as a 3Mbyte-persecond data transfer rate. The company also claims that by endorsing ANSI standard tape cartridge media and format, Unisys is the first major US domestic system supplier, other than IBM itself, to offer full data interchange with IBM via cartridge technology. The 5073/0899 is being delivered worldwide to users of Unisys 1100 series mainframes, and later this year, deliveries will start to users of A and V series mainframes. A minimum subsystem, consisting of a 5073 Control Unit and an 0899 Dual Drive, sells for $110,550. Channel expansion features, and a Dual Controller communication feature to enhance performance and redundancy, are also available. Larger configurations can support up to 16 host connections and 16 drives, offering dual controllers per subsystem.
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