Unisys Corp plans a major enhancement of its half-inch cartridge tape product line – using IBM 3480-type cartridges, saying that customers have responded very positively since it added drives to its large mainframe product lines last year: a serial stacker to complement the cartridge tape was introduced earlier this year and host software control will be added shortly, as well as host controlled data compression on its large mainframes that have cartridge drives attached, using a compression algorithm that will on average, store twice the data that can currently be recorded on a cartridge; it is also developing an automatic robotic cartridge library that may include the data compression algorithm, and will have dual independent robotics, two or four tape controllers, and up to 16 cartridge transports.
