IBM adds to OEM storage line

Electronic News, March 16, 1992 by Gerry Khermouch

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. -- IBM last week broadened the range of storage products it is seeking to OEM, offering a 120MB unit in the 2.5-inch form factor while boosting the capacity of its high-end, 3.5-inch hard drive.

The company also repackaged several of its existing drives in novel configurations, bundling two of its high-capacity 3.5-inch drives into a single unit fitting within the 5.25-inch form factor, and saying it will offer an existing 80MB 2.5-inch drive as a removable unit fitting into existing 3.5-inch disk drive bays.

The introductions continue what competitors and other outside observers have characterized in recent months as an unusually aggressive attempt by IBM to market its storage devices outside the company, as part of a previously disclosed effort to seek $3 billion in annual OEM sales by the mid-1990s.

Whether the strong development and sales effort is being matched by a comparable success in winning outside customers is more difficult to say, given customers' general reluctance to disclose their procurement decisions on drives.

In an interview last week just before he took off for the CeBit show in Hannover, Germany, where IBM was to have a large OEM display, the executive directing the OEM effort on the storage side insisted that things are proceeding on schedule.

"The bottom line is we're doing very well," said Chuck Haggerty, vice president of OEM Storage Products in the Storage Products line of business. "We've done extremely well, especially in high-end products, including the 1GB drive. We're starting to deal with a whole different clientele."

As reported, the 1GB, 3.5-inch drive chalked up its first major customer in IBM's own Applications Systems line of business, which is employing the drive in some of its new E-series machines (EN, Feb. 24). In the interview, Mr. Haggerty asserted that "We've signed up a number of outside clients" for the drive, as well, but declined to disclose their identities. however, a Canadian maker of storage subsystems, Dynatek, was visible on the Hannover show floor as a user of the 1GB unit.

The company, which surprised some competitors by being first to market with a 1GB-class 3.5-inch drive, said it has increased the capacity of that DASD to 1.2GB, in conformance with a roadmap it outlined about the time of the Comdex show last fall (EN, Nov. 4, 1991). the higher-capacity unit is available at a price of $2,500 in evaluation quatity and will ship in volume in the third quarter.

In the 2.5-inch form factor, IBM boosted the capacity of its low-profile units with a half-inch-high 60MB unit, priced at $350, and a 0.67-inch-high 120MB model priced at $450. They will ship in volume next quarter.

IBM also said it will offer its year-old, 80MB 2.5-inch unit as a removable drive fitting within 3.5-inch drive bays, on a special bid basis.

In the 3.5-inch form factor, IBM pushed down its price for more commodity types of drives, offering an 80MB unit priced at $300 in evaluation quantity and a 160MB unit priced at $355.

Of the idea of packaging two 1.2GB, 3.5-inch drives in a 5.25-inch form factor, Mr. Haggerty acknowledged that "Quite honestly, we were a little skeptical. But now we've worked with a number of customers who are embracing (the concept) very rapidly."

He said prospective customers found the new configuration to be an appealing way of incorporating the performance benefits of IBM's magnetoresistive-head drives without having to do "a lot of metal-bending and reengineering" of their existing systems. It runs $3,750 in evaluation units -- competitive, Mr. Haggerty said, with 5.25-inch units -- and will hit production volume by the third quarter.

At the Hannover display, Sharp was visible as one customer of IBM's 2.5-inch drives, and Epson as a customer of lowcost 3.5-inch units.

Also unveiled last week was a faster model of IBM's 3.5-inch rewritable optical drive and a rewritable 5.25-inch optical drive.

The 127MB 3.5-inch rewritable drive now has a claimed data transfer rate of 625KBps, up from 384KPps, while rotational speed has been boosted to 3,000rpm from 1,800rpm. Data seek time went from 60ms to 40ms.

At Hannover, IBM also showed a redundant array of independent disks (RAID) that con-figures 400MB or 1GB 3.5-inch drives to provide up to 7GB of storage.