The Four Hundred

StorageTek is back on the iSeries bandwagon. After a period of about two years, with no new compatibility between OS/400 and its tape drives and libraries, the company has recommitted itself to supporting the iSeries. This commitment takes the form of backcasting OS/400 support for some older tape products, as well as promises to support the iSeries with a new tape drive later this year.

Before getting into the new iSeries support that StorageTek is offering, let's take a look at where StorageTek has been, to get a better perspective on where it might be going. StorageTek was founded in 1969 by a group of ex-IBMers who had one goal: to create clones of IBM tape drives and sell them for less than IBM was charging. As a developer of clones of IBM tape drives, the IBM S/3X midrange platform has been a traditional focus of StorageTek, along with the mainframe, of course. StorageTek eventually expanded into selling mainframe disk drives and survived a bankruptcy after a major glitch in those disk drives killed sales, coming back with the first enterprise-class RAID 5 mainframe disk array (code-named Iceberg) in the early 1990s. StorageTek then formed a partnership to sell those disks, until IBM's own Shark arrays obviated the need for the Iceberg products.

In 1999, StorageTek introduced its next-generation, high-end tape drive, the 9840, a clone of IBM's half-inch, mid-point load Magstar 3490 tape drive. At the time, StorageTek was forecasting an explosion of demand from AS/400 shops. The AS/400 was coming off one of its best years to date, in 1998, when it sold some $4.2 billion worth of AS/400 servers and integrated disk subsystems. Considering the frenzy in IT spending--driven by the spread of the ERP software, the Y2K date problem, and the mushrooming of dot-coms--StorageTek expected AS/400 sales to continue to grown in 2000 and 2001. In fact, to meet the expected need for AS/400 expertise, StorageTek increased its AS/400 support staff by more than 50 percent in the beginning of 1999 to service this expected need.

Of course, the large increase in AS/400 sales never materialized. Sales started drying up in the second half of 1999, and sales of the AS/400, and then the iSeries, have continued to shrink every year since. This was predominantly caused by the failing economy and a glut of hardware purchases in 1998 and early 1999. So, by 2000, StorageTek was in a fall-back position of concentrating its efforts on Windows and Unix, which were growing faster than OS/400, further eroding StorageTek's commitment to the OS/400 platform.

At the same time, StorageTek's attention was increasingly on Unix and Windows platforms, where a market for storage management software was blooming. There wasn't a big need among AS/400 shops to incorporate OS/400 servers into open storage initiatives, although IBM Rochester was working on allowing AS/400s to participate in storage area networks (SANs) by building support in OS/400 for Fibre Channel (an important development for StorageTek that we'll get to later on). The AS/400 already had perhaps the industry's most advanced storage management system in OS/400's single level storage architecture, and a collection of software vendors, including LXI, Help/Systems, and Pinnacle Business Systems--not to mention IBM itself--backed that up with utilities for building hierarchical storage systems.

The relatively basic storage management architectures of Windows, and to a lesser degree Unix and Linux, meant that the greater opportunity for developing and selling storage management systems was there, and not with OS/400. IBM has a lock on OS/400. Besides, people strongly believed at that time that shipments of Windows and Unix would continue to increase, an assumption that proved to be correct. While the mainframe was not a growth platform, mainframe customers are the largest companies in the world, and nobody in their right mind would purposefully alienate them. StorageTek, a $2 billion publicly traded company trying to get back on its feet after poor execution by management, layoffs of 20 percent of its workforce, and a close call with a second bankruptcy in five years, saw the writing on the wall. And AS/400 wasn't scrawled there.

So while StorageTek was very keen on the prospects of selling its 9840 drive to AS/400 shops in the beginning of 1999, that keenness faded quickly. What followed was a series of new StorageTek tape drives and tape libraries that did not offer OS/400 support.

In February 2000, StorageTek introduced its L180, a tape library that could hold up to 174 tape drives and up to six 9840 drives. However, you could not connect an AS/400 (as OS/400 servers were known back then) to the L180; only mainframes, Windows, or Unix servers were supported. In October 2000, StorageTek introduced the follow-on to the 9840, called the 9940. The main difference between the 9840 and the 9940 was capacity; the 9840 could hold 20 GB of data natively, while the 9940 debuted with a 60 GB native capacity. What's important to note, in terms of StorageTek's commitment to the OS/400 platform, was that the 9940 could not connect to the iSeries.

In October 2001, StorageTek introduced an updated version of the 9840 tape drive, called the 9840B. The main improvement that the 9840B had over the original 9840 was speed. The 9840B was almost twice as fast as the original 9840, transferring data at up to 19 MB per second, uncompressed, and finding its first piece of random data in less than 12 seconds, compared with the 9840's random read time of 20 seconds. Again, no OS/400 support with the 9840B. Then, in May 2002, StorageTek introduced another library, the L5500. The L5500 is a large library, holding up to 132,000 tapes and up to 960 tape drives, either the high-end 9840 or 9940, or LTO tape drives for midrange shops. Again, the L5500 did not support the OS/400 server when it was introduced.

In 2002--as the "Green Streak" promotion from IBM was pointing the way Big Blue would take pricing with the revamped iSeries line in early 2003, and as there was a growing consensus that IBM needed to shake up its iSeries line to get it moving--StorageTek rethought its stance on OS/400 support. "We took a hard look at things. We hadn't given the AS/400 a great deal of focus or attention," says Ian Stewart, a StorageTek product director. "For a year and a half or two years, we weren't adding product connectivity on the AS/400. It's always been there, but we put a lot more focus on the Unix and Windows side, as it grew rapidly."

In the fourth quarter of 2002, StorageTek made a decision about its iSeries support. "We had a significant number of customers who had heterogeneous systems, but the AS/400 was pretty central," Stewart says. "What we started to do was to make sure that all tapes and libraries had AS/400 connectivity."

Stewart says StorageTek based its decision on an analysis of the iSeries market size and its growth potential, both for current and potential OS/400 shops. Certainly, StorageTek didn't know at the time that the first quarter of 2003 would be the best the iSeries would have in a long time. Indeed, the fourth quarter of 2002 was a good one for the iSeries as well, as the deep price cuts that IBM offered on iSeries Model 270s and Model 820s with the Green Streak deal--pricing IBM effectively rolled out across the entire iSeries line this January--drove customers to upgrade from vintage AS/400 boxes.

In addition to the improved market potential that StorageTek saw in the iSeries, the platform's support for Fibre Channel was another driver that caused StorageTek to give the black box a second chance. IBM delivered Fibre Channel support to the iSeries with OS/400 V5R1, and greatly improved Fibre Channel connectivity with the release of OS/400 V5R2 in April 2002. "The new Fibre Channel support in 5.1 and the enhanced support in 5.1, that effort was key," says Todd Adler, manager of engineering at StorageTek. With SCSI connectivity, the SCSI interface was a bottleneck in connecting to StorageTek's tape drives, while early Fibre Channel connectivity with the iSeries "was embarrassing," Adler says.

In the last few months, StorageTek has brought OS/400 support to the 9840B and 9940 tape drives and the L180 and L5500 tape libraries. Later this year, StorageTek will deliver a C version of its 9840 tape drive, and will support OS/400 when that product ships, says Adler. "The plan is not to lag," he says.

StorageTek is also looking at how to support the iSeries with its LTO tape products. "We don't have a formally certified way of attaching LTO to the iSeries," Adler says. "We've done it in the lab, but it doesn't work very effectively. We've taken a look at using some type of intermediate box," such as TD Systems OmniServe storage router.

One area where StorageTek apparently has no plans to support the OS/400 is with its disk business. The use of disk for backup and archiving is growing, according to recent studies. While there are few OS/400 shops today using disk for backup, except for the largest shops that can afford IBM Shark arrays or EMC Symmetrix arrays, there are some smaller companies supporting OS/400 with their disk-based backup appliances, such as STORServer.

Continuing support for the OS/400 server would seem at first glance like an easy decision to make. With nearly half a million boxes in the field at a quarter million companies around the world, it is too big an opportunity to simply walk away from. However, business is business, and companies--especially public companies beholden to stockholders--are driven by the bottom line, and there's precious little room for how one feels about a particular box. At the same time, strong feelings are partly what keeps the legions of OS/400 shops using their AS/400 and iSeries boxes.