History 2001: Storage Sales of $198 Million for Fujitsu-Siemens

Sales of Fujitsu-Siemens Computers (FSC) in the storage subsystems sector attained €220 million ($198 million) for the company’s fiscal year ending March 2001.

This figure is practically identical to that of the previous year’s exercise. The information comes to us from Dr. Helmut Beck, VP product division storage for the German joint-venture, at 50%-50%, between Fujitsu and Siemens.

Not unlike Bull in France, the computer manufacturer produces no storage products and develops only limited software. Rather, it’s an integrator, which qualifies itself as a “European storage solutions provider,” and which is the largest EMC customer in Europe, but which also works with other partners, including NetApp, Adic, StorageTek, Exabyte, Legato, CA, Brocade, Emulex, Vixel and Crossroad.

FSC is hardly what you’d call a major player in storage yet, particularly when you compare its sales in this one sector to its total revenues, which amount to $5.9 billion.

But there is a clear desire within the company to progress in this domain, even if up to now, it has not committed the kind of resources invested by other computer manufacturers such as Compaq, HP, Hitachi, Sun or IBM.

Like them, however, FSC has launched its first interoperability tests of various SAN components within its Brussels, Belgium subsidiary, which was one of the pioneers in storage for the group, beginning 6 years ago, according to Guy Legrand, director FSC Benelux.

There is, nevertheless, a near-line virtualization product that has been specifically developed by FSC. CentricStor is a virtual tape SAN subsystem, with FC connection and a frontal RAID that can be connected to up to 128 different tape drives through SCSI interface. Data compression occurs at the CentricStor level in order to maximize speed, before data is transferred to tape. Among the system’s original features: the possibility of dual save volumes, that is to say, simultaneous backup of data on 2 different tapes, whether local or remote, hence a kind of tape mirroring, or RAIT-1. CentricStor is compatible, incidentally, with nearly all of StorageTek’s libraries.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 160 on May 2001 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.