History (1992): Datasave in Storing for AS/400

Datasave (Gennevilliers, France) has one single activity, compatible peripherals for storage on AS/400s.

It has just added to its line of products optical disk subsystems from Fathom Technologies (Boulder, CO) and will soon offer the Alpine RAID from Storage Technology (Boulder, CO).

Formerly with Econocom, David Benizri, chairman and president, founder and owner of Datasave, set up in July 1989, focused the entire activity of its company on IBM’s AS/400 minicomputers.

There are about 15,000 of them in France.

Concerning storage peripherals for these computers, he noticed that Big Blue had lacks in its line, and his firm tried to complete them with US compatible products.

“As of last year, the company reported FF20 million sales, end FF30 million are expected for this year,” says Pascale Bourdais, marketing manager.

And with comfortable profits, Benizri believes that, today, its company, that has 500 customers and offices in Lyon in addition to its Gennevilliers’ HQs, is third in France in this AS/400 compatible storage market, behind Memorex Telex in Levallois-Perret and Decisions Systems International, a subsidiary of Olivetti in Gennevilliers.

“When the AS/400 began, there were many lacks. The most important one was that there were no Exabyte 8mm tape backups. You had to use a pool of disks or very expensive 3480 drives. IBM finally added an 8mm drive, but only the 2.3GB one. It still has no 5GB unit in its catalog and you still can’t connect several drives,” notes Benizri.

Datasave successfully sold Fathom (previously Quarterdeck Systems) 8mm subsystems. Even Axone, a subsidiary of IBM, buys from this compatible distributor. Its line includes just about all the systems based on magnetic tapes: quarter-inch Fathom, half-inch Cipher and StorageTek, 4mm Archive. Only optical and magnetic disks missed to complete the entire line of AS/400 storage peripherals.

But Datasave has just signed a partnership agreement, the first one for StorageTek in France, to distribute Alpine, a high level small fault-tolerant disk array system, or RAID, Iceberg’s version to come and aimed at AS/400s.

The new optical offer also comes from Fathom. It includes the Laser 21E, a Hewlett-Packard jukebox for 32 multifunction M-O disks and 2 Sony drives, with a total capacity of 21GB. This peripheral can store standard data or can be used as an image server, and in this case just like IBM’s ImagePlus solution.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue ≠54, published on July 1992.