Old technology doesn’t matter if the development team is committed, creative and customer focused, said Cindy Grossman, vice president of Tape and Archive Storage Systems.

That’s why IBM’s Tucson operation at the University of Arizona’s Science and Technology Park, 9000 S. Rita Road, continues to innovate and expand, she said.

Last month, the team announced another improvement in tape and disk storage systems, even as the company’s Armonk, N.Y., headquarters reported a 19 percent increase in sales for the second quarter, compared to the same three-month period, in 2006.

The storage systems division unveiled the next generation of tape memory solutions for mainframe computer customers with a virtualized addressing scheme that allows for automatic, three-way information storage. Designed to be configured for large and small firms, the new system reduces energy consumption, said Marketing Manager Chris Saul.

Virtualization allows computers to create an address for data separate from the actual physical address of the data on a particular storage device. This frees systems to establish much larger storage than the drives can hold on their own.

"Small business, especially, needed that type of technology," he said. "Tape has always been energy efficient, but as density has gotten so much greater, to 700 gigabytes or more, there was a need for more efficiency."

There was also a need for the automatic mirroring, Saul said.

"When the data is critical, you want a back-up for your back-up," Saul said.

As for the advance in disk storage virtualization, Marketing Program Director Brad Johns said what’s been developed for multiple drives is a single addressing scheme that allows multiple disks on multiple systems to be accessed as one disk while clocking speeds 75 percent faster than IBM’s previous version.

"This has allowed companies to reduce storage growth by 20 to 30 percent," he said, "With very little slowing, using cache memory, it gives the capability for terabyte sites, many miles away from each other."

Grossman said IBM in Tucson has many possibilities.

"This is the most impressive development team I’ve ever dealt with" Grossman said. "They’re customer focused and driven to excel. If any of our customers need something, they find a way to do it."

She said the company has a bright future.

"That’s why I’m confident we’ll continue to succeed," Gorssman said. "We’ll be continuing to develop the right products to bring to the market."

Contact Philip S. Moore at

pmoore@azbiz.com or at (520) 295-4238.