StorageTek Commits to Fibre Connection Roadmap

Storage Technology (StorageTek) plans to release a native FICON version of its T9840B tape drive within the next year and plans native FICON versions of future high-end tape drives. Additionally, StorageTek said it will enable FICON connectivity in its Shared Virtual Array (SVA) disk storage system to benefit customers in the mainframe disk subsystem market. .

“QLogic’s relationship with StorageTek is further strengthened by our mutual commitment to the adoption of FICON technology. StorageTek’s leadership in being an early adopter of technological advances to address the fast-changing needs of customers has made StorageTek an ideal partner for helping QLogic increase efficiency while maintaining quality, speedy connectivity,” said Frank Berry, vice president of QLogic Corp.

FICON is a follow-on technology to the fibre optic-based ESCON channels currently dominating the high-end MVS tape storage market. With a data rate of 100 MB/s burst, FICON channels can also read and write data concurrently on the same link, effectively doubling the channel bandwidth to 200 MB/s burst.

Currently offered with ESCON, SCSI and Fibre Channel interfaces, the StorageTek T9840B is equipped with a 2Gb fabric aware interface for 200 MB/s SAN infrastructures. The T9840B has a a 19 MB/s native data transfer rate, 70 MB/s maximum compressed and random access to data in less than 12 seconds.