Data storage group Iomega says sales of its ZIP products have made it optimistic about further market growth.
In her presentation at Iomega`s summer update in Johannesburg yesterday, the company`s VP for EMEA, Ulrike Tegtmeier, said the performance of the company`s ZIP products over the past three years shows that the company "is headed in the right direction".
She said although the ZIP drive was not the most popular of its product offerings, it is managing to move about a million drives and five million discs per annum.
Tegtmeier attributed the product`s more than average performance to the fact that company`s original equipment manufacture partners are also doing a lot to market the range.
"We have not been doing well with our internal devices, but with our external HDD and CD-RW and DVD devices, we have been leading the market."
She noted that the Rev drive, which was launched at the beginning of the second quarter of this year, has proved to be a success, more so in the EMEA region than in the US.
"This has been the quickest growth in product popularity we have seen since the launch of the ZIP drive."
Tegtmeier also revealed that Iomega is developing new products with HP and IBM, and added that the next three years will see Iomega enhance its existing product range and launch more new devices.
New autoloader unveiled
At its update session, Iomega launched its disc-to-disc autoloader, designed to replace the SCSI tape-based autoloaders and other backup devices in small to medium business networks. The REV Autoloader 1000 uses REV discs instead of tape and will be available in January.
The device is a 2U single-drive desktop device with 10 slots for native capacity of 350GB, or 700GB with 2:1 software compression, all managed with the bundled enterprise-strength BrightStor ARCserve backup standard edition r11.1, plus disaster recovery software from Computer Associates.
Other optional accessories for the REV Autoloader include the barcode reader for expedited inventory management and a 19-inch rack-mount kit.
The company says the REV discs are engineered for long shelf life, estimated to exceed 30 years.
Industry software support for the REV drive has been growing since the middle of this year, with eight storage vendors supporting the REV drive. Iomega says it will continue to work with other vendors to certify compatibility with their solutions.
Share
