History (1995): RAID Newcomers at Comdex

At Comdex, the list of new arrivals (or those we haven’t seen before) in this sector continues to grow.

It now includes Mountain Gate (Reno, NE), Infortrend (Taipei Hsien, Taiwan), Technical Solutions (St. Paul, MN), SWS Corp. (Newbury Park, CA), and Antrone Research (Anaheim, CA).

Two firms have developed RAID units which build on Iomega’s Jaz drive, employing a 1GB interchangeable cartridge. MicroNet Technology (Irvine, CA) revealed its new Array2000J, which combines 2 Jaz units in a single enclosure configured in either striping or mirroring mode. Price: $1,275. ProMax Technology (Irvine, CA) has engineered a subsystem with 2 or 4 Jaz drives in RAID-0 for Macintosh computers.

Unknown in RAID circles, CyberStorage Systems (Littleton, MA), formerly Clovis Technology, will now offer a controller integrating up to 400MB of cache, exploiting up to 648GB on one SCSI ID.

Digital Equipment (Maynard, MA) announced a 67% performance boost to its StorageWorks RAID Array 410 through enhanced version 2.7 firmware, which enables 4,350 I/O per second with a single controller configuration. Introduced in January 95, the product is compatible with HP UX, IBM AIX, Sun Solaris and SunOS platforms. It is expected to support Windows NT by early 1996. The enhanced 410 will be available in January at $23,052 for a 12.9GB configuration. Dual controller starts at $29,821. Upgrade for the previous gen will be shipped directly to customers on a PCMCIA flash card. DEC announced the sale of its one millionth disk, tape or optical drive component since the company announced the Storage Works product architecture in 1993.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue 95, published on December 1995.