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Quantum slaps OEM customers, chins Seagate

And you thought storage was dull...

A senior executive at the Quantum Corporation said today that HP, IBM and Seagate will fail to deliver on their Ultrium tape storage solution. IBM and HP are major customers of Quantum's DLT tape storage, which the hard drive manufacturer acquired from the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), some years back. Quantum was at Marxist hideout Quo Vadis in Soho London, in an attempt to explain why the joint initiative between HP, IBM and Seagate -- dubbed Ultrium -- will not work. Senior executive John Barnes, based at Quantum Bracknell, insisted that his company's DLT solution was better than anything that the Ultrium consortium can and will offer. But Bill Boles, a senior executive at Quantum in the US, went far further than that. Boles said: "LTO [the consortium] does not have the capability Quantum has." Nor, said Boles, would the LTO Ultrium offering deliver the backup that large corporations need. He insisted that despite the size of HP, IBM and Seagate, Quantum would still be able to deliver backup storage, well into the next millennium. Boles said that the top five PC customers in the world used its DLT solutions. Those are HP, IBM Compaq, Dell, and Sun, he said. He said that Quantum, a $6 billion corporation, was unlikely to be taken over by any of these players above in a very lucrative market that is keeping the HDD company going. We wonder about that. ® RegisterRevolutionaryFact Before Damien Hirst (he of the halved cows) took over the famous Quo Vadis restaurant in Soho, London, it was owned by an old family, seemingly unaware of the fact that Karl Marx lived in the attic, a fact that's marked by one of the famous London blue plaques. In 1956 the then owner said to an acolyte: "You know all that crap in the attic? We wanna clear it out, so please do so." The acolyte managed to sell the Victorian furniture but reported back to the gaffer than no-one wanted to buy the books because they were all scribbled over. "Burn them, then," said the gaffer. And so Karl Marx' annotations were duly burnt in old Soho...

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