History 2005: Tandberg Continues to Invest in Disk Appliances

Tandberg Data has acquired Computer Design Group or CDG located in Manchester, UK, for an unknown amount.

Almost simultaneously, the company also offered 10% of its share capital, or $6.5 million, on the Oslo Stock Exchange.

We had never even heard of CDG prior to this acquisition. And yet, according to Tandberg executive VP Knut Aulund, “CDG has been a tremendous success (.. .) and its storage designs are well proven, with a user base of over 15 million.”

The tape company will thus pick up a new storage appliance, BakStor, which is a RAID-protected iSCSI device with integrated backup and recovery functionality for SMBs.

Former CEO Mark Klarzynski of CDG, apparently one of the rare RAID makers in Europe, was nominated storage solution director for Tandberg.

Tandberg has for some time now been looking to enter the D2D2T sector in order to diversify from its core tape business, threatened in recent years by disk-based solutions.

In 2002, it acquired Land-5, which became InoStor, a NAS company responsible for inventing a new RAID level, the RAIDn. To date, however, there is only one known licensee, nStor Technologies. No doubt it will take a certain amount of time to integrate both InoStor and CDG technologies.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 208 on May 2005 from the former paper version of Computer Data  Storage Newsletter.