The Four Hundred

It's not every day that a new company enters the iSeries hardware market to take on IBM in its virtually captive installed base, but today the midrange gets a new storage vendor, Global Storage Technologies. GST is headed by David Breisacher, founder of BCC Technologies, a privately held disk and tape subsystem maker for the iSeries and AS/400 that was acquired by venture capitalists earlier this year and renamed as eStorage.

The startup, which is being privately funded, is based in Lake Forest, California, and has 10 employees, eight of which are engineers who are designing future products for the company, many of which will be coming out in the next few weeks. Breisacher has shied away from venture capitalists this time around and wants to be able to more closely focus on product development and marketing than he was able to at his former company, BCC. "I don't want to run a finance company; I want to run a products company," he says. "I don't want to get entrenched in the VC [venture capital] mindset, where financing is more important than products."

While GST is launching its company today, it is providing only sketchy details on its exact product plans. The company will provide storage products for IBM's iSeries, pSeries, and xSeries lines, concentrating first on tape subsystems, autoloaders, and libraries. Breisacher is committed to offering the simplest product line across these IBM platforms, and will sell products that can connect to all three types of machines. He says that he is not going to differentiate the products artificially and charge different prices for what is essentially the same machine, based on what platform it attaches to. This is a good idea, and one that iSeries shops will welcome, since they usually get the prices on their storage equipment jacked up higher than equivalent gear on Unix or Intel-based servers. GST's tape solutions will be supported on OS/400, AIX, Windows, and Linux operating systems. While acknowledging that Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, Dell, and others have considerable installed bases, particularly for Windows and Unix systems, Breisacher says that for now GST will focus on only the IBM product lines that he and his engineers know so well. GST is not going to chase the zSeries mainframe market, which is small in terms of the number of customers and is under virtual control of IBM and StorageTek in tapes and IBM and EMC in disks.

GST plans to partner with Sony to deliver AIT-1, AIT-2, and AIT-3 tape subsystems and will partner with none other than IBM to get LTO-1 and LTO-2 tape drives, which it will repackage. These are the core tape products that GST will sell in the midrange. GST also plans to partner with Tandberg Data for its SLR tape drives, based on the quarter-inch cartridge tape technology that Big Blue developed for its midrange machines decades ago, that are still a popular choice amount small and midsized iSeries shops. GST will partner with Qualstar for a midrange tape library and with Overland Storage for an enterprise tape library. The company is also lining up services partners to support the resulting products it creates, once they get into the field. While Breisacher is mum on the subject, DecisionOne, IBM Global Services, and maybe even HP Services are possible options.

While Breisacher did not want to divulge all of GST's product plans right now, given his extensive background in iSeries storage is it very likely that he will launch disk arrays for IBM's midrange server lines, too. And, like all other storage vendors that see the high prices that IBM can command for iSeries and pSeries main memory, the engineers at GST are probably also pondering the possibilities here, too. While midrange disk storage is an easier market to break into, the iSeries market already has IBM, EMC, and eStorage chasing that market, and the pSeries and xSeries platforms have plenty of disk providers, too--mainly IBM and EMC for the bigger customers. The tricky electronics of iSeries and pSeries memory make it a tough market to get into, but there are relatively few players pushing pSeries and xSeries main memory. Cambex sells pSeries, xSeries, and zSeries main memory but has shied away from the iSeries market for unknown reasons, which is especially odd, considering the very high prices IBM charges for iSeries memory. Kingston sells main memory for some older RS/6000 and Netfinity machines, but it does not offer memory for modern eServer machines. There's room for competition here, certainly.

Breisacher knows the midrange memory racket about as well as anyone. In college, he founded College Computers, in Irvine, California, which sold white-box PCs to students at several universities, including Cal State Fullerton, Cal State Long Beach, and University of California at Irvine. College Computers put him through college, in fact. That's how Breisacher got a taste for both manufacturing and selling. While in college, he took an internship at a fledgling company based outside of Boston, called EMC, which, at the time, was a $60 million company with a couple hundred employees that had not yet hit the bigtime with its Symmetrix arrays. Breisacher eventually became a System/3X memory salesman. In his early 20s, he founded BCC, which he ran until earlier this year.

GST did provide some teaser information about its product plans as part of its company launch. GST's internal tape drives will scale from 70 GB to 200 GB, with prices ranging from $1,950 to $4,350. An enterprise-class tape library will span from 6 TB to 96 TB of archiving capacity, with a single-module library costing $21,450 and an eight-module library costing $324,000. One of the first innovations in the GST tape products will be what the company is calling Server Transparent Media Duplication, which mirrors drives and libraries to produce two concurrent archive sets. By mirroring the backup, if something goes wrong with a tape archiving operation--say a tape snaps or a machine hangs--then one set of machines can keep performing the backup and time is not lost. If both sets work, it is easy to have one set stored locally and one set stored offsite, for better data security. GST also will launch Backup Consolidation and Fault Tolerant Backup as part of its tape products, but exactly what these features are will remain a mystery for a few more weeks.