StorageTek Flexes Disk

Tape vendor Storage Technology Corp. (StorageTek) (NYSE: STK) is looking to put more backbone behind its disk-backup products (see StorageTek Expands Disk Backup).

The Louisville, Colo.-based company announced plans to strengthen its disk line, both on the technology and marketing fronts. Product enhancements include adding virtual tape for open systems, six years after developing virtual tape for mainframes, as well as a new series of disk-backup products. StorageTek is also rebranding its disk product line to remove confusion about its offerings.

Gone are the B series (a.k.a. BladeStore) and the D series. They will all be sold under the new FlexLine brand. JR Roedel, senior director of StorageTeks Information Lifecycle Management Solutions (ILMS) group, says customers were confused by the different series of disk products.

“We realized we needed a common brand,” Roedel says. “We found with the D or B series or BladeStore, it was not giving customers simple answers as to what goes where.”

The disk muscles StorageTek hopes to Flex have been growing, possibly at the expense of its traditional tape business (see Storagetek Announces Q2). Disk makes up only 8.9 percent of company revenue, but is rising while tape declines. In the quarter that ended in June, StorageTek’s disk revenue grew to $46.2 million, up 4.5 percent from the previous quarter and 9.8 percent from the previous year. Its virtual tape revenue grew 25 percent from the previous year to $40 million. Meanwhile, tape revenue declined 8.8 percent from the previous year and 3.6 percent from the previous quarter, its second straight quarter of sequential decline. StorageTek has also been beefing up its disk sales force to keep momentum going.With more organizations using disk instead of tape for backups, one analyst says all tape vendors have to beef up their disk-backup products -- even if it cuts into tape sales.

“In our industry more than any other, companies have to eat their children or somebody else will,” says Arun Taneja of the Taneja Group. “The important thing is they have disk and data protection, and they’re promoting it as an alternative.”

Still, customers will have to wait until next year for the best parts of StorageTek’s new disk announcement. The FlexLine 600 series that replaces BladeStore won’t become available until 2005, nor will the virtual tape for open systems (see StorageTek to Punch Into Disk Backup).

Roedel says the FlexLine 600 series will include SATA drives and an intelligent storage processor that will increase performance to help compete against SATA systems from EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC), IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM), and Network Appliance Inc. (Nasdaq: NTAP). The FlexLine 600 systems will scale in 500-Gbyte increments from 3 Tbytes to 88 Tbytes.

Virtual Storage Manager (VSM) Open is based on the FlexLine 600 and fixes a major hole in StorageTek’s product line. Although StorageTek has had its VSM product for mainframes since 1998, it fell behind EMC and NetApp, rival tape vendors Advanced Digital Information Corp. (Nasdaq: ADIC) and Quantum Corp. (NYSE: DSS), and startup Sepaton Inc. in offering a virtual tape product for open systems.StorageTek launched two lower-end disk systems that are available today: the entry-level FLX210 SATA system and FLA300 Fibre Channel system. Both come from OEM deals with Engenio Information Technologies Inc., which also supplied StorageTek with its previous D series. The FLX210 supports 14 SATA drives internally and scales to 112 SATA drives. The FLA300 is an embedded switch system designed to reduce latency and supports 14 FC drives.

The systems use Engenio’s SANtricity software suite, which allows organizations to mix Fibre Channel and SATA drives behind the same controller, and asynchronous remote disk-to-disk mirroring for disaster recovery.

List prices are $15,000 for FlexLine FLA300 and $10,000 for the FLX210.

— Dave Raffo, Senior Editor, Byte and Switch