InformationWeek

October 20, 1997

StorageTek Goes Virtual

Tape system helps exploit libraries

torage Technology Corp. stepped into the emerging market for virtual tape systems last week when it announced Virtual Storage Manager. The high-end tape-drive market leader is aiming VSM at companies that want to better exploit their existing StorageTek tape libraries. But the product won't ship until well into next year, and analysts say IBM, which already sells a virtual tape product, may use its head start to grab a bigger slice of the overall tape-drive market.

VSM, like competing products, is designed to help users save money by using their tape drives more efficiently and packing more data onto each ta pe. The product appeals to Larry Duntz, assistant manager for computer services at Raytheon Aircraft Co. in Wichita, Kan. Raytheon needs to back up an ever-growing number of servers in a limited time window. During that time, "there never seem to be enough tape drives," he says. Also, many of Raytheon's thousands of tapes are only half-full of data. "VSM will allow us to fill up tapes," he says.

VSM consists of three components, says Linda Higdon, StorageTek's director of marketing for Nearline products: a subsystem based on StorageTek's disk drives that acts as a buffer for data that's being transferred to and from tape drives; control software; and GUI-based console software for reporting and management.

StorageTek will aim VSM at existing customers; it claims more than 10,000 tape libraries installed worldwide. "We'll position this to add value to the product already in the data center," Higdon says.

One user sees VSM as a way to speed key business operations. Insurance Services Office Inc. in New York stores thousands of tapes containing policy information off-site and must retrieve them each time employees need to access stored policy data, says Dick Fernandez, the company's assistant VP of computing services. VSM could let Insurance Services keep more data on site, eliminating the time needed to retrieve data from tape, he says.

VSM comes with between 180 Gbytes and nearly a terabyte of disk space, as well as a hefty price tag-from $300,000 to more than $2 million, respectively. The Louisville, Colo., company says it will ship to early customers in the first quarter of next year and in volume by mid-year. The product will initially work with mainframes, but StorageTek plans to add support for Windows NT and Unix systems a year later.

IBM, though, already has 300 sites using its Magstar Virtual Tape Server (VTS), and that puts pressure on StorageTek. "IBM's virtual tape product isn't as robust as StorageTek's-but it's shipping," says Carl Greiner, a VP at Meta Group. "StorageTek must get the product out on time."

IBM and StorageTek dominate the high-end, mainframe-based, tape market. IBM is shipping its virtual tape system based on highest- capacity Magstar tape drives, which will each store as much 30 Gbytes of data.

Greiner says it's likely IBM will use its lead to chip away up to 15 points of StorageTek's dominant 90% share of the high-end tape market. The virtual tape market includes a third player, Sutmyn America, which offers a product that supports both IBM and StorageTek drives.

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