History 2002: Tandberg in Subsystems

Tandberg Data has acquired Land-5 for an undisclosed price.

The company will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Tandberg’s US subsidiary, in which the Norwegian parent company now holds only 55%, compared to 100% previously.

Dr. Farouk AI-Nasser, a 30-year veteran of the storage industry, who has served as president and COO of Land-5 since April 2001, will become president and CEO of Tandberg USA. Recall that he previously worked at StorageTek, SyQuest, Cipher Data, Iomega and Exabyte.

At the same time, the founder and CTO of Land-5, Kris Land, becomes CTO of Tandberg USA.

Land-5 is a San Diego, CA-based privately-held company specialized in RAID technology and NAS. Its patent-pending RAIDn technology allows users to select the level of “insurance” desired vs. the failure of one or more disk drives in a RAID array, all the way up to N-1 drives (where “N” indicates the total number of drives in the array).

According to Frank Roszyk, Tandberg’s European GM, the company is soon planning to release a NAS and SAN solution combining disk and tape drives.

Nearly all disk and tape drive manufacturers are looking to enter the market for storage subsystems and solutions, where profit margins are more comfortable. This is also true, for example, of Seagate, Maxtor and Quantum, as well as of Western Digital (until the latter sold off Connex). Now it is Tandberg’s turn.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 171 on April 2002 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.