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Storage Technology Corp. (StorageTek)-
Computer Storage - Category Directory
303-673-5151
One
StorageTek Drive
Louisville, CO 80028
www.storagetek.com
Sales
$2.2
billion
Business Description
Storage Technology Corp. (StorageTek or the Company) was incorporated in
Delaware in 1969. Storage has been our only business for more than 30
years. We design, develop, manufacture, and market a broad range of storage
solutions for digitized data, including business continuity and disaster
recovery solutions. These solutions are designed to be easy to manage and
allow universal access to data across servers, media types, and storage
networks in both the mainframe and open-systems environments. We are an
innovator and global leader in virtual storage solutions for tape
automation, disk subsystems, and storage networking.
We provide products and services to a broad range of customers, including
large multinational companies, midsize and small businesses, universities,
medical institutions, and governmental agencies. Our customers encompass a
broad range of industry sectors around the world, including financial
services, retail sales, healthcare, broadcasting, telecommunications,
transportation, and a variety of manufacturing industries.
We market our products and services to end-user customers through our direct
sales organization and through our indirect channel partners, including
original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), value-added distributors (VADs),
value-added resellers (VARs), and other distributors.
We maintain a presence in many major cities of the world. We operate sales
and service offices throughout the United States and Canada, as well as
throughout various international regions, including Europe, Asia-Pacific,
and Latin America. U.S. operations accounted for approximately 51% of our
total revenue in 2002, and international operations accounted for
approximately 49%.
Strategy
Our vision is to be the storage experts who deliver easy to use,
industry-leading, innovative storage solutions to manage and protect
business critical information. We intend to realize our vision of becoming
the storage experts through Information Lifecycle Management (ILM), our view
of an adaptive storage environment that dynamically balances information's
changing value with the cost of managing it over time.
Today, most businesses don't quantify the value of their information.
Because storage device costs are steadily declining, there has been no
perceived need to re-evaluate storage costs to align with information's
value. However, we believe escalating information growth and changing
business conditions are requiring businesses to reconsider how they manage
and store their information.
We work to help our customers manage information according to its value,
reduce complexity, and optimize storage device utilization. ILM may assist
in this effort by giving our customers the tools to balance their storage
costs with information's changing value. It is designed to help customers
make the right information available when and where it is needed, all at the
right cost. By applying the ILM building blocks described below, customers
may be able to achieve a proper balance in managing their storage
infrastructures.
The ILM framework consists of the following four building blocks:
• Store—Providing flexible storage to meet every performance level
• Manage—Making decisions about data and devices
• Replicate—Placing data in multiple locations
• Integrate—Applying services and networking
We provide a comprehensive range of storage solutions that protect our
customers' information assets across industries, applications, and
information life cycles. Customized storage strategies include a variety of
storage devices and retrieval times to achieve the right level of data
availability at the right cost. Proven tape, disk, storage integration, and
software solutions are designed to be open and to integrate easily into the
most data-intensive situations, helping to improve productivity in
heterogeneous environments. Advanced virtual storage solutions allow our
customers to expand their storage options while containing costs and floor
space use. Superior scalability protects our customers' storage investments
and assures a growth path with minimal disruption.
BUSINESS SEGMENTS
We are organized into two reportable business segments: storage products and
storage services.
STORAGE PRODUCTS
Within storage products, our principal products are divided into three
classifications: tape products, disk products, and network products, in each
case including related software.
Tape Products
Our tape products historically have generated a significant portion of our
product revenue. These products are engineered to provide reliable,
cost-effective storage of digital information and consist principally of the
following:
• Automated tape libraries. Our L-Series automated tape libraries range from
the L20, with up to 2 tape drives and 20 tape cartridge slots, to the L5500,
with up to 80 tape drives and 5,500 tape cartridge slots. L-Series libraries
are used primarily in open-systems environments and support a wide variety
of tape drives. These libraries provide significant flexibility to the
customer because they can be easily installed, scaled, and upgraded.
The PowderHorn® 9310 automated tape library is our largest-capacity library,
with two robotic hands and up to 80 tape drives and 6,000 tape cartridge
slots. It is a high-capacity, high-performance system for use in mainframe
and open-systems environments.
• Tape drives. The T9840 series tape drives are designed to optimize access
speed and are ideal for transaction-intensive applications. The T9940 series
tape drives are designed to optimize capacity and are ideal for archiving,
record retention, and disaster recovery applications. The T9840 series and
T9940 series tape drives are used in both the mainframe and open-systems
environments and can be attached by SCSI, ESCON, and native Fibre Channel.
We also sell mainframe and open-systems tape media, Quantum tape drives, and
Linear Tape Open (LTO) tape drives.
• Virtual tape solutions. The Virtual Storage Manager™ (VSM) system is a
virtual tape product that provides customers with an intelligent
software-driven data storage management solution. It is designed to maximize
tape utilization, free up floor space, and optimize batch processing. VSM
uses a disk buffer and virtual tape technology to optimize access time,
throughput, and physical media and transport use, which result in
significant savings for the customer. It is currently available for the
mainframe environment.
Disk Products
Our disk products are designed to maximize disk capacity utilization and
provide fast access to business critical information, scale to customer
storage requirements, and support storage area network (SAN)
implementations. Our principal disk products include the following:
• V-Series. The V2X Shared Virtual Array™ (SVA™) subsystem is a virtual disk
storage subsystem designed for both the mainframe and open-systems
environments. The V2X utilizes a virtual architecture that permits customers
to use 100% of their disk storage capacity, saving both time and money. The
V2X facilitates rapid data restoration and maximizes application and system
availability.
Our Virtual Power Suite™ software, which is offered in conjunction with our
SVA products, is designed to provide virtual duplication and significantly
reduce central processing unit and channel utilization costs associated with
data movement.
• D-Series. Our D-Series disk products are designed for open-systems
environments and are offered through a strategic alliance with LSI Logic
Storage Systems (LSI). The D280 disk subsystem is the newest D-Series disk
product. It allows customers to efficiently and effectively consolidate
their open-systems storage and is designed for high performance in
bandwidth-intensive applications like video streaming, medical imaging, and
seismic processing. Our D-Series disk products also include the D178 disk
subsystem, a midrange-class storage solution, and the D173 disk subsystem, a
low-range-class storage solution.
• B-Series. We introduced our BladeStore disk subsystem in October 2002.
BladeStore is a cost-effective disk storage solution designed for
open-systems environments. It utilizes Advanced Technology Attachment (ATA)
disk drive technology to offer customers enterprise-class reliability and
availability, extreme storage density, and scalable capacity at an
affordable price. We believe that BladeStore will complement
enterprise-class disk by driving down prices and will complement tape with
faster access.
Network Products
Our storage network products provide a total integrated SAN solution to our
customers by enabling cross-media, cross-platform, and cross-vendor
accessibility. Our principal storage network products include the following:
• StorageNet® 6000 (SN6000) storage domain manager. The SN6000 provides
network-based virtualization that enables open-systems hosts and
applications to share multiple tape storage devices that appear to be
directly attached to each host. The SN6000 enables seamless, scalable, and
highly efficient management of tape storage resources, allowing customers to
more effectively manage their data.
• Networking hardware. Our wide range of Fibre Channel connectivity devices
allows our customers to leverage all of their digital assets. We provide or
resell leading world-class products including Fibre Channel switches and
multi-protocol storage routers for SAN solutions.
STORAGE SERVICES
We provide a broad portfolio of storage services to help our customers
maintain, support, and manage their storage infrastructures while reducing
their total cost of ownership. Our storage services offerings include the
following:
• Enterprise maintenance and support services. We provide global maintenance
and support services for storage products and integrated-system solutions
through a combination of service engineers, remote diagnostic tools, online
and telephone assistance, and local third-party service providers. We have
strategically located our distribution centers throughout our markets to
provide spare parts on an expedited basis. We provide different levels of
service to meet customer requirements, including on-site service, same-day
or next-day service, and parts exchange.
• Professional services. We provide global professional services that are
designed to help customers solve their storage management and integration
issues in a cost-effective manner. Our principal professional services
offerings include the following:
SAN design and implementation services
Data center design, build, and relocation support
Storage architecture consulting services
Storage solutions integration
Virtual tape optimization services
Business continuity plans
Enterprise backup and recovery services
COMPETITION
The data storage industry is intensely competitive and is characterized by
rapid and continuous technological change, short product life cycles,
changing customer requirements, and aggressive pricing. Our competitors vary
in size and offer a broad range of products and services. We compete
primarily on the basis of technology, product availability, performance,
quality, reliability, price, and customer service. Strong competition has
resulted in price erosion in the past, and we expect this trend to continue.
Competition for data storage products and services is characterized based on
the class of products or services, as described below:
• Tape products. We are a leading provider of automated tape libraries, tape
drives, and virtual tape solutions. Our main competitors in these markets
include Advanced Digital Information Corporation, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and
Quantum.
• Disk products. Our disk product offerings compete in the mainframe and
open-systems disk markets. EMC, Hitachi, and IBM hold
dominant positions in the mainframe disk market. These competitors also have
much larger research and development programs, as well as substantially
greater financial, technical, and marketing resources, than we do.
Competition is much more diverse in the open-systems disk market, which is
characterized by low barriers to entry.
• Network products. Our SN6000 has a limited install base as it is targeted
for tape networking applications. We also offer third-party network products
in conjunction with storage integration offerings for our customers. The
market for network products is highly competitive and characterized by low
barriers to entry and rapidly changing standards for protocols and
interconnects.
• Storage services. We compete with a wide range of service providers who
vary in terms of size and service offerings, no one of which is dominant in
the storage services industry.
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StorageTek
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