GST Launches a Broad Line of Midrange Tape Products

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

A few weeks ago, we told you a new storage company named Global Storage Technologies had been launched to provide various storage alternatives for IBM's iSeries, pSeries, and xSeries customer bases. This week, GST is rolling out its tape storage products, as it engineers other storage products--very likely disk arrays and maybe even server main memory--for future release. The company is focusing on tape for now, which is a core competency of GST's founders.

GST has more than 150 different tape products available. GST has partnered with Sony to deliver AIT-1, AIT-2, and AIT-3 tape subsystems, and GST has hooked up with Tandberg Data for its SLR tape drives, a variant on the quarter-inch-cartridge tape technology that Big Blue developed for its midrange machines decades ago, which are still a popular choice among small and midsized OS/400 shops. GST has partnered with IBM to get LTO-1 and LTO-2 tape drives, which it will put into tape arrays and tape libraries, and it has teamed up with Qualstar for a midrange tape library, and with Overland Storage for the core guts of its enterprise tape library. GST will be supported on OS/400, AIX, Windows, and Linux operating systems, with its tape solutions running on iSeries, pSeries, and xSeries servers. The company may branch out beyond the IBM eServer line at some point (it makes sense to), but right now it is focusing on the customer bases it can most easily attack.

Table 1 shows the different products and technologies that GST will be peddling, including their prices.

Table 1: GST products and technologies

There are a few products from GST that will appeal to iSeries shops in particular. The first is an internal AIT tape drive that can slide into an iSeries server. This product, called the Internal eServer Tape Drive, augments or replaces the SLR drive that IBM offers as the base product for the iSeries line. David Briesacher, chairman and CEO of GST, says that the AIT-3 drive his company is selling holds 100 GB of uncrompressed data, moves data at 43 GB per hour, and sells for $4,300, while IBM's SLR100 quarter-inch tape drive holds only 50 GB of uncompressed data, can move data at only 18 GB per hour, and sells for $6,000 from IBM. The AIT drive has twice the capacity and twice the data speed, at a price that is 28 percent lower. The GST AIT drive also has a built-in LCD screen that monitors the progress of tape backups, so system administrators can see how things are going and do diagnostics when something goes wrong. This is the kind of value add--faster technology, lower price, more bells and whistles--that GST is going to use to differentiate itself from IBM and other midrange storage vendors.

Another interesting product that GST is announcing is a dual-drive LTO tape subsystem that makes mirrored copies of server archives simultaneously. This function, which the company calls Server Transparent Media Duplication (STMD), means that companies can make a local and remote archive of their data using one single run of their tape backup software. In environments where the tape backup window keeps getting smaller and smaller, and the need to be absolutely sure data is backed up, this mirrored backup capability is going to be useful. STMD also means that if one of the LTO tape drives fails, or a tape cartridge fails during an archiving session, the other tape drive in the solution keeps going with the backup, without any delay.

All of the 150 products that GST is announcing this week are available immediately. Prices are the same for versions of the machines that attach to iSeries, pSeries, and xSeries servers.

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