BCC Says IBM's 10K & 15K Disks Are Now OK

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

After seeing the story last week about how IBM had apparently updated the microcode in its 10K RPM disk drives and fixed some of the problems that had been plaguing the 15K RPM disks that have not yet made it to the iSeries platform ["Has IBM Solved Its iSeries Disk Problems?"], BCC Technologies contacted us to say that it has complete confidence in IBM's disk drives now that engineering and microcode changes have been made.

To back up that commitment to IBM's 15K RPM disks, BCC is offering AS/400 and iSeries shops a GB-for-GB disk drive trade of IBM's 10K RPM disks for BCC's 15K RPM disks, which are actually using the IBM 15K RPM Ultrastar 36Z15 disks that Big Blue has not yet announced for the iSeries product line. (That might happen in July, when the iSeries Regatta servers are announced, although it could happen earlier if BCC steals too much business away from IBM.) BCC will swap out the IBM disks for its own disks, which offer about 50 percent better performance, for free. The company is asking customers to pay for installation, maintenance, shipping, and taxes. The swapped BCC drives cannot be put into leased machines, obviously, because leases do not allow such rejiggering of hardware without the permission of the leasing company. The BCC disk swap promotion will expire on March 31. You can sign up for it at www.bcctech.com/promotions/DiskSwap.htm.