Compaq Computer Corp. this week announced several upgrades to its disk storage and tape storage products, many of which have been selling for months but are now official and generally available, officials said.
The highlights from the Houston-based company are new rack-mounted tape options for the MSL 5052SL library and the availability of a new Brocade Communications Systems Inc. fabric switch and a management service for storage-area networks.
The MSL 5052SL improves with support for SuperDLT tapes and smaller 10U form factor, targeted at departments and workgroups. The new Brocade switch is a 2 Gigabit-per-second 16-port model; the SAN (storage area networks) management service derives from Compaqs recent alliance with Storability Inc., of Southborough, Mass., said Gary Wright, director of enterprise storage marketing. Theres also a new rack-mount tape option “so you dont have to have it packaged in the same physical rack where the server is,” Wright said.
Also new are VirtualArray expansion cabinets, for up to 35 terabytes of storage in a three-frame unit, with more incremental offerings than were previously available. Host-bus adapters from Qlogic Corp. are new as well, for connecting Compaq storage products to Sun Microsystems Inc. servers.
Rounding out the new products, officials said, are increases in AIT tape drivers from 6 to 12 megabytes per second, and from 50 to 100 megabytes in capacity, a tape maintenance kit for diagnostics, firmware updates and cartridge cleaning, and a new rail kit for mounting tape products into older Alpha servers.