History (1990): Grau Shipped 50 Automatic Tape Libraries

Until now, Grau GmbH (Böhmenkirch, West Germany) has installed 50 automatic ABBA libraries for IBM 3480 cartridges worldwide.

Its first customer is Siemens, Comparex head company, with whom Grau signed a partnership agreement to recommend ABBA units to clients equipped with Siemens mainframes.

Since Siemens centers also use robots, the company acquired a total of 14 of them. Grau’s second customer is IBM with 4 libraries installed: one in Böblingen (West Germany), another one in Tucson, AZ, and finally a double configuration in Milan (Italy).

Among the 50 installations, 6 are fixed robots, 32 are movable on racks, and 12 are double robots.

Spardat (Vienna, Austria) has the largest configuration since it can handle 28,800 cartridges.

German speaking countries are from way back the main users with 37
libraries, ahead of France (7), Italy (2), Denmark (2), The Netherlands (1) and USA (1).

Grau also recently acquired a major participation in its exclusive distributor in France, Abba France, that becomes therefore a subsidiary of the German company.

The 50 ABBA robot installations worldwide

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue ≠32, published on September 1990.