The Havant, Hampshire based Xyratex Ltd says that the decision by its erstwhile parent, IBM Corp, to pull out of OEM and distribution channel sales of magneto-optical disk drives will have minimal impact on its business. IBM decided in August, in the wake of management changes at its San Jose, California based Storage Products Division (CI No 2,637), to discontinue the development, manufacture and sales of optical drives for OEM and distribution channels, and to concentrate tape development activity on the Magstar cartridge and high performance 3590 subsystem; there will no longer be any work on low-end or mid-range tapes. As for Xyratex, since being cast loose from IBM in a management buyout last December (CI No 2,566), it has been trying to establish itself as a provider of a whole array of storage products and within a couple of months of its buyout it launched a range of optical disk drive products based on IBM’s 230Mb drive mechanism (CI No 2,611), which have been affected by IBM’s decision. The company said that it will try to source components from other suppliers but pointed out that so far, its storage offerings accounted for only 1% of its รบ350m turnover, and the magneto-optical drives are a very small proportion of its work. At the higher end of its storage products, it has just launched the S9000 (CI No 2,637), a tower storage unit capable of storing 32Gb of data on standard magnetic disks, which makes use of the Serial Storage Architecture interface and is aimed at the broadcast market for storing video, sound and graphics. The interface is about four times faster than Small Computer Systems Interface. And the 540Mb removable cartridge drive that it is manufacturing for Avranches, France-based Nomai SA is expected to be launched next quarter. Nomai says it has designed the drive as a cheap removeable hard disk, aimed squarely at multimedia applications. The hard drive has access times of 10mS and 4.5Mb to 5Mb per second transfer rates. It measures 1 by 4 by 5.9 and it weighs roughly 15 oz.
