History (1998): Consolidation of Tape Library Makers Continues

The number of tape library manufacturers seems fairly disproportionate with the actual market for the products, and furthermore, some of them are having a tough time of it.

After Quantum’s acquisition of ATL Products, it’s the fast-growing Adic’s turn to treat itself to Emass (eMAcom), Raytheon’s tape storage division, for the tidy sum of $27 million.

Raytheon, focused primarily on manufacturing for the US military, and thus not particularly anxious to devote its energies to the manufacture of automatic libraries, is no doubt relieved by the deal.

Emass has been cutting a fine figure on the market, particularly after its acquisition of Grau in 1992. It also took over Creo Products, an optical tape company, 2 years ago. And it now has significant operations in Colorado and in Germany, with total revenues of $64 million during calendar year 1997, 60% from Europe alone, thanks to Emass/Grau.

The latter unit employs 135 people, with roughly 250 customers in Germany, including an important partnership with Siemens, and another 60 clients in France.

Emass, established in 1986, began with the marketing of large D2 cartridge libraries made by Odetics, but due to quality problems, turned to Grau and its large 3480-type libraries.

According to Didier Papion, with Emass Grau Storage Systems (France), the Grau name will remain linked to Emass in Europe, where 2 business units will co-exist, respectively supporting the offerings of Emass and Adic. In this case, buyer and bought could not complement one another better.

Adic is in the low-end of the PC-LAN NT market, while Emass is in the high end of libraries for Unix,d MVS, and its dowry also includes an excellent field service organization.

What we didn’t already know, incidentally, is that the Scalar 1000 device listed in Adic’s catalogue is in fact the equivalent of the Emass ALM-S for 150 to 800, DLT, AIT or type-3590 cartridges.

Adic’s libraries are available with DLT, AIT, DAT and Exabyte 8mm tape drives.

Meanwhile, Emass offers robotics solutions for the same devices, but also for D2, VHS, DTF, NCTP and optical media, with a family of storage management software (HSM and volume management control).

Papion also reveaed that Emass will support

LTO. Adic has already made a move toward the FC interface, not the case for Emass.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 128 on,ptember 1998 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.