StorageTek bulks up tape, trims disk

Capacity doubled

Flexing its muscle in both tape and disk, StorageTek this week made a pair of moves to round out its storage line-up.

In its core tape business, StorageTek has rolled out the latest member of its T9X40 tape drive family - the T9840C. The new drive has double the capacity of previous products at 40GB per cartridge (uncompressed) and boasts a high 30MB/second data transfer rate.

The product is aimed square at enterprise customers looking to add tape storage to their SAN (storage area network). The T9840C has a built-in 2Gbit Fibre Channel interface, which should make linking with SAN systems relatively painless. It starts at $38,000.

While tape continues to bring in revenue for StorageTek, the company has moved to address the growth of disk storage. Tape and disk move ever closer to a price parity, which makes faster disk storage the more attractive option for a lot of tasks.

Keeping in line with this trend, StorageTek has chopped the prices on its D-series family of disk subsystems by up to 30 percent. StorageTek sells four different D-series Fibre Channel systems, which run its SANtricity management software.

Storage vendors use the acronym SAN is such compelling ways. ®