History (1990): IBM Automatic 3480 Tape Cartridge Library Not About to Come Out

It’s been three years since IBM has been trying to offer an automatic library for 3480 cartridges in its catalog, to compete with StorageTek’s successful ACS 4400.

This product is not close of being offered.

First, IBM had asked the German company Grau Datentechnik GmbH (Bohmenkirch, West Germany) to develop a product that was shown at Hanover Fair in 1988. The two companies could not reach an agreement and negotiations collapsed in August 1988.

Big Blue then turned to another German company, Haushahn Gmbh (Stuttgart, West Germany) so it would develop and manufacture this product.

And suddenly in October, Grau filed a suit patent court in Stuttgart accusing Haushahn of stealing Grau’s design and obtained a preliminary injunction to prevent Haushahn from marketing the library.

At that time, IBM had bought a prototype of the library from Grau who blames IBM of having shipped to Haushan, infringing their agreement.

Grau’s model uses a robotized arm originated from IBM to remove and replace 3480 cartridges but the entire conception was made by Grau with a linear-track system much more voluminous than StorageTek’s rotary design.

IBM France explains that the company has no offer for automatic cartridge libraries, that perhaps the market is not big enough for such a size unit and that’s why it only offers drives with ten removable cartridges in connection with to high-capacity hard disks.

However, a few months ago, IBM France was offering an automatic library, but only on paper, very similar to Grau’s.

All this ought to relieve StorageTek that is slowly recovering with only its ACS 4400 library that only works with StorageTek’s compatible drives and not with IBM’s ones.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue ≠24, published on January 1990.