History (1993): IBM Mainframe Storage Announcements

According to some information from ComputerWorld that have been confirmed to us and completed by an internal source from IBM, Big Blue is going to renew a large range of its storage devices, its disks in 1Q94 and shortly after magnetic tapes for its mainframes.

The most amazing product will be a RAID-5 with enhancements to avoid the usual slowness in writing for this type of architecture, this will lead actual 3390-3 disks. It will hold 1 to 16 drawers with 2 to 4 3.5-inch disks with an individual capacity of 2GB, which means a maximum of 256GB, but about useful 200GB. This fault-tolerant 9590-HA system will attach to a 3990-3 or -6 controller.

Its price will be around $5,000 to $7,000 per gigabyte, just like for the other subsystem that will be launched at the same time, probably under the reference 9390-HP performing better than the fastest 3390-3, on account of a cache that can reach 9GB. Like the 9340 disks, 9390-HP’s will have their own integrated controller, but will once more hold the same small disks.

Working in mirroring mode and planning the replacement of defective disks will be possible, the MTBF for small 3.5-inch drives being much lower than for 10.8-inch disks, according to our source from IBM.

These 2 HDD subsystems should be available between the end of the first and second quarter, depending on the options. The first one, the RAID, is going to compete with Iceberg from Storage Technology Corp., a unit that debuted in November 1987 and since its official announcement in January 1992, was several times delayed. According to the latest news, the product should be available before the end of the year in the US, but we’re already in December… The second product will compete with EMC Corp. and its 3000 Symmetrix already installed.

Some time later in 1994, IBM will upgrade its 3490 cartridges. The largest ones, the 3490’s, stored 800MB. Here, we will directly reach 10GB, without the IDRC compression that can triple this capacity.

The longitudinal density is three times higher, and since the tape path speed is unchanged, we reach a 3 to 9MB/s transfer rate. Additionally, the number of tracks (144) is 4x higher. The recording unit will only be able to read (and not write) 800MB cartridges, but not the previous 200 to 400MB ones. This twelve-fold increase in the individual capacity of the cartridges is of course going to have an impact on the 3494 and 3495 automatic libraries, but not on the most widely used ones, those from StorageTek, with already 6,100 sold, but that only work with STK drives. IBM is also working on its own helical scan tape technology to improve its RISC/6000 workstation range.

IBM has never been so dynamic in this storage segment, especially on account of the new autonomy given to its San Jose unit, IBM Storage Systems Division. PCM manufacturers, already in bad shape – except EMC -, have plenty of work on hand.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue 71, published on December 1993.