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BCC Sells Refurbished IBM Disks, Offers 35 GB Units
by Timothy Prickett Morgan
BCC Technologies, one of the two remaining
independent disk storage vendors for iSeries and AS/400 servers, is offering refurbished IBM disk drives in addition to its own disk subsystems, which are based
on brand new IBM disk drives. As BCC gets new customers, it often takes their existing AS/400 and
iSeries disks in trade to help lower the cost of a move to BCC drives. This was common practice in the
open AS/400 memory card market, when there was one, in the early 1990s.
To that end, BCC is offering a special during March on IBM's 10K RPM, 8 GB disk drives, which the
company is offering for $850 apiece. According to BCC's latest storage price guide, the company is offering SPD
and PCI versions of refurbished IBM disk drives for between 15 and 63 percent of current IBM list price
for the machines. (If you want to find out if the prices BCC lists in its guide are indicative of current market
prices, you should consult the Midrange Blue Book.
Remember that OS/400 shops that subscribe to Guild Companies newsletters can sign up for the annual
price guide and get $50 trimmed off the regular price of $399 if they use promotion code MSI-01.) In any
event, even without knowing the current street price for second-hand IBM AS/400 and iSeries disks, BCC
is charging less than IBM list for the units.
BCC also says it has updated its iSeries and AS/400 disk drive configurator to reflect the new IBM 35 GB disk drives,
announced a few weeks ago. The BCC disk configurator requires users to have Microsoft Excel. BCC has also announced its own variants of the
IBM 35 GB disks, and is using the new IBM UltraStar 73ZX 10K RPM disks to create a 35 GB disk,
employing the company's FAST short-stroking technology to boost performance.
Back in January,
BCC said that, after examining all the problems customers were having last year with the various disk
drives IBM uses in the OS/400 platform and the engineering and software changes IBM had developed for
its 10K and 15K RPM disks, it was firmly behind the IBM disk drives and endorsed them in its own
products. BCC has used disk drives manufactured by IBM, Seagate Technology, and Fujitsu in its AS/400 and iSeries disk subsystems. BCC adds its own
controllers and short-stroking microcode called Fast Access Storage Technology. The FAST algorithms
allow BCC to shorten disk access time and increase throughput in exchange for cutting the disk's storage
capacity roughly in half. These disks can later be reformatted for the full size of the disk if additional
storage is needed. They will, of course, provide lower throughout and have longer access times after the
FAST algorithms are removed.
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