History (1992): StorageTek Plans Libraries With Helical Scan

In the coming years, StorageTek (Boulder, CO) is going to launch an entire line of automatic libraries supporting standard 3480 cartridges but also new helical scan tapes and even digital paper with a huge capacity.

Days of troubles and Chapter XI are over. StorageTek, stronger than ever, has not only launched the first real disk array system for IBM’s mainframes but also unveiled its future plans for automatic cartridge libraries.

Cabinets will be more or less large, some faster. And in these libraries, if cartridges still look like standard IBM 3480s, the inside will be different and their capacity will have considerably improved.

“With close to 4,000 libraries installed worldwide, and 200 in France, we hold 90% of the market,” says Claude Fer from StorageTek France. “This product represents 75% of our sales“.

No other manufacturer has troubled the success of the Colorado-based company since it launched its 4400 ACS in 1987.

IBM, who didn’t believe in this product at its beginning, is now promising through Ray S. AbuZayyad, who is at the head of the new independent storage products unit, to develop its own library before the end of the year.

But isn’t it already too late, when the worldwide market for this type of product is restrained to around 10,000 units in the mainframe segment?

Strengthened by its experience, StorageTek is going to develop the 4400 ACS thoroughly and produce new drives. In these coming developments, two major technological enhancements should be put ahead. They don’t apply to the robots but to the cartridges they handle.

In 2 years from now, cartridges with similar 3480 plastic housings should be launched, they will still contain a half-inch wide tape but no longer using longitudinal recording technology on 18 or 36 tracks, but helical scan recording and store 20GB, 50x more, leading to a 120TB library. Just like in a VCR, the new drive will R/W the tape, moving slower, with a rotating drum equipped with several heads, and slightly out-centered from the tape’s direction, to write down a sequence of small oblique tracks.

It’s the same basic technology used in video recording but also on 4mm DAT or Exabyte’s 8mm drives.

And to reach this, StorageTek already signed an agreement with the Japanese Matsushita/ Panasonic, specialized in helical scan recording.

An ANSI draft standard on this new recording format is in process. And furthermore, 2 or 3 years after, the plans are to replace the magnetic tape by a special film with a very high resolution that can be with attacked by a laser beam to store up to 200GB, 10x more, in a single 3480 type cartridge, says Sam Taub.

It is an optical WORM type media, but with a much higher archival ability. It probably is the one developed several years ago, and named Digital Paper, by the ICI chemical group that formed a department, ImageData (Welwyn Garden City, Hertz, England), to offer it as a media to drive manufacturers.

LaserTape Systems (Campbell, CA) is already working on a 3480 cartridge based on ICI WORM film.

Iomega had tried to develop an optical FDD using the same digital paper and based on its Bernoulli technology, but gave up.

Creo Products (Burnaby, BC, Canada) managed to produce an ICI tape in a reel-to-reel drive that can store 1,000GB, but only sold a few until now.

These future helical or optical cartridges and their drives will be able to fit in just about all StorageTek’s libraries, beside actual same sized 3480s.

And depending on its needs, the user will be able to have 3 levels of storage in its library: 1/ a low capacity standard and fast backup IBM compatible; 2/backup on slow high capacity helical scan tape but incompatible; 3/ long term final archiving on optical film cartridge.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue ≠49, published on February 1992.

Note: These StorageTek’s products never reached the market.