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IBM Spins Down
beggs writes "IBM and Hitachi have signed an agreement which will take IBM out of the hard drive market in three years. This press release on IBM's web site gives some details of the deal. 18,000 IBM employees and all their hard drive related patents will join about 6,000 Hitachi employees to form a new company that will be a subsidiary of Hitachi. Sad to see big blue out of the hard drive business, they have made a lot of contributions to computing." We did a story when they announced their plans back in April.
$2.5 billion to get out of the hard drive market sounds like a good business deal for IBM to me.
... we should avoid Hitachi brand HDDs now?
What will stop Hitachi from firing everyone after three years and moving production to cheaper Asia?
I am still not sure whether globalization is a good thing or not.
Maybe IBM finally brought some of this vapor-ware storage technology to production and they are just selling their drive business for what it is worth today rather than let it die when the new technology is introduced. IBM has always been at the bleeding edge of research so maybe they have something up their sleeve?
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
I'm seeing that too.
I heard a rumour that Sun Microsystems are in financial trouble, and IBM are interesed in taking over the Java section. Can anybody confirm/deny this?
How long do you people think it will be before harddrives are replaced by newwer forms of datastorage?
As long as Hitachi still puts cash into R&D then we should still see cool technology come out of this new company.
It will still have all same IBM employees -- the same people who came up with the cool technology in the first place.
There is a certain irony in the way in which the huge boom - founded on the idea that computing was to become so cheap to use that it would transform all aspects of the economy - should result in the bust that will reduce competition and so make computing more expensive.
We all know the dangers of monopolies and how innovators can rapidly turn into blocks on progress, so we'll have to watch with care.
The IBM Death Star has been defeated! The rebellion has won! :D
Their strength is their institutional consulting contracts... but that's hardly a growth path as the IBM name slowly, over time, becomes known for nothing in particular.
This was always their strength. It was almost like they made computers to support their consulting initiative.
Don't ever count this out - large corporations will always want this kind of service. It gives them the warm fuzzys to know there is some place to point a finger.
IBM does not want to compete on hardware. It wants to become a services company. Getting rid of hardware is a good step on the way to becoming really profitable again.
My blog
well, i am not sure about this, but i believe Sun's 2 major hdd suppliers were Seagate and IBM .. they had 2 suppliers since at a certain time, Seagate alone could not provide them with the requested amounts ..
...
well now, since IBM's are owned by Hitachi, Sun does no longer have to buy their disks from a competitor.. they buy them from from a partner !
good news indeed
Yes, those nasty Hungarian manufactured junkers will soon go by the wayside! Yippie!
I think that the new spin off will do good however. I am curious though... and this is because I see this with my own eyes and hear through friends (it happens all the time and is increasing). When IBM started to shut down, did they let people go that were good quality workers that now must in essence reapply to the new spin off? Where there a bunch of decision makers that caused the problems (or just made them worse) that never found their job in danger? In other words, did the cancer just get moved into a new body? I sincerely hope not, for the workers and of course for myself as I would like inexpensive quality drives.
The harddrive market is not really a lucrative bussness anymore. The costs of developping harddrives with larger capacity is almost outgrowing the earnings of selling drives.
IBM has a good reasearch facility which have come up with new methods for storing data. Probably they want to raise money for the production of some of those methods. It's not that that division was skyrocketing their sales revenue anyway...
This event reminds me of a time when the IBM AT was the hot sh*t and IBM was going around touting their wares.
At a demo, the IBM sales rep asked for questions. My friend said "How fast is your drive?" This was at a time when 60ms access time was SOTA. The IBM rep said "80ms..." My friend retorts "But the current tech is 60ms" to which the IBM rep said "See? IBM's is faster".
Doh.
Glad to see IBM's HDD go...
don't forget to park the heads before shutting off the lights.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
Umm. IBM has a PATENT division/business, in and of itself. All that arm does is collect royalties, and sign licensing deals.
That alone should be enough to keep IBM in business for decades.
Also note: Certain IBM HDD operations are not included in the deal.
I would suspect this is the research area that is working on the next-generation HDD stuff. I don't think IBM would transfer any existing patents it hasn't already milked all the royalties out of.
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
Sad to see big blue out of the hard drive business, they have made a lot of contributions to computing. Yeah, it's really sad. I'll espacially miss the 75gxp series.
So does this mean that IBM will also stop doing R&D for new drives and storage techniques such as the stuff they are doing at Almaden?
EMC is in fierce competition with Hitachi in the enterprise market. EMC used to buy it's drives, the base units anyway, from IBM. Wonder how EMC will do having to buy its drives from its biggest competitor?
we speak the way we breathe --Fugazi
40/60 gb gxp's.
:D
:P I know certain types seem to have a fetish for arcane and archaic tech. (Which, while not yet, these disks will eventually become.)
Zero problems.
Maybe I can pick up a few more cheap now that IBM's officially heading out.
They'll probably become collectors items though.
Ah well. *hugs the 2400bps modem hanging from his wall* ph34r my ph4t p1p3!!!
Most likely IBM has already technology that will obsolete hard disks. What would be a better way to get rid of expensive manufactory lines than selling them before they get obsolete?
All the problems for simple solid state storage have been solved except for one ... cheap deep sub-micron patterning. Photolitography is simply too expensive, inkjet cant go small enough. Simple embossing seems most promising (just like pressing CDs with matrices).
If this problem can be solved memory cells like the ones from thinfilm.se will be able to be produced at very low costs with roll-to-roll processing.
IBM has always been tops on the Research and Development in the field of Computer Science. It is not too bad that they are leaving the hard drive market, but actually good that they are doing this. The Hard drives have turned into a commodity. People are making them cheaper and cheaper. At some point, there will so cheap that 1) there will be very little profit margin 2) only a handful of companies will be able to profit.
I'd rather see IBM dump this branch and be able to earn royalty or have stock ownership in this new company than bog down their budget with this sector. By dumping this sector, they can now effectively use their R&D to develop something new. Maybe a new hdd technology, that they will license to the new company.
_______________________________
"I'm not Conceited...I'm just a realist..."
IBM still does a lot of semiconductor fabrication research and licenses the patents out. I would guess this will happen to hard drive technology.
Making chips and hard drives is basically a commodity business. The real money is in developing new methods, products, etc. that can be licensed. IBM is very good at this.
"Sad to see big blue out of the hard drive business..."
IBM drives used to be good. They were expensive, but they were good. You knew that if you sprung the extra cash for an IBM drive you were paying for reliability.
Exactly when this changed I don't know, but what I do know is when I hear of people who have had a large capacity drive die suddenly overnight, my first reply is 'is it an IBM?' - literally every case within the last year has been 'yes - how did you know?'
I (and many others) are presently involved with a class action lawsuit against IBM for claiming that their drives are reliable when they are not. I unfortunately bought an IBM Deskstar 75GXP drive when looking for a solid reliable drive however this turned out to be a big mistake. It was the first IBM drive to use a glass platter to reduce costs etc. but unfortunately it simply made the thing extremely unreliable. My own tests have shown that the thing is VERY susceptible to overheating, and the only way I could get it to retain any data was to keep it as cool as I can (at this point using seperate screw on dual fan HDD cooler and extra case ventilation with nothing near the drive).
Bye IBM - you wont be missed (like my 50Gb of data was).
You have got to be kidding. They have seen the light. Take a look at IBM Global Services. That is where the $$$ is, and that was a major reason for the Compaq buyout by HP.
I've seen 20 out of 30 of my GXP drives die in the last year. 12 of the drives sent to me after RMA were Refurbished.
It's funny, I don't remember buying a refurbished drive in the first place.
If you can't stand by your good *and* bad products, you don't deserve any of my hard earned $$$.
F IBM
IBM has been a leader in the "How many terabyte can you fit on the head of a pin" race. I dare say if it weren't for them we would be stuck with 500M drives (probably not but hey this is slashdot). Unless Hitachi can be as inovative as IBM has we may want to get cozy with our storage limits for a while.
They give financial bonuses to anyone in the company who files a patent... they run a great public, free patent search database... and they defend and license them with vigor. I am curious whether they will still do hard disk drive R&D, or just mass storage R&D. Given all that IBM has cooking in its labs, it could be that they want out of hard drives because "the end is nigh" for that mode of storage. I'd look at storage innovations and patents filed by IBM in the last 5 years or so to see whether this is actually the case...
died.
if we would have let the nazis kill all the damn jews in the first place we wouldn't be worrying about hard drives
the fucking jews have been the cause of problems in our economy for ages - I be asia wouldn't be able to make the drives cheaper if it wasn't for those damn jewish bastards
-5 ignorant.
"with the speed that our economy is changing, we won't even notice the flux of 24,000 jobs"
24000 people would beg to differ, I'm sure
"We're more well known for our R&D efforts contributing to the latest in technology."
"We're" best known for our tremendous wealth gap, and our lovable platitude-spouting morons who insist that 24000 people losing their jobs is a good thing, and that those who lose their jobs will "get over it" and "move on" to something better.
Your ignorant, ignominious, Limbaugh-looney bleatings betray the fact that your concept of "human capital" lacks any trace of humanity. Nice flamebait, though.
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
...they have made a lot of contributions to computing.
as if they will stop making contributions. that statement would have made sense if their biggest source of revenue was the hard driver market and if it was hard drives that brought them so much fame or if hard drives played such a pivotal role in their lives that had they not created hard drives they would not be where they are now. im sorry but hard drives were only incidental to their plans. where do i get this information? look at their product lines and where they put their advertising. its computers. not hard drives. so blah.
What exactly have you been missing with regards to drivers for your hard disks? Hardly the area where drivers are needed..
his comment was hardly as flameable as yours
Thanks Big Blue!
Brought to you by the we-didn't-like-benefits-anyway-department
...and that's the way the cookie crumbles.
What does this mean for their newer micro drives they have been developing? I was really looking forward to seeing these in my Gamecube, but Nintendo isn't know for making new agreements with new companies all to fast. Will they have to make an agreement with Hitachi to use them?
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C:\>shipdisk
--
If you moderate this, then your children will be next.
oops...sorry about that
...and that's the way the cookie crumbles.
....I have had three IBM drives go belly up on me.
Three! The only other drive to go bad (on me) was a Western Digital... and I think that was a fluke.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
The point made originally is that IBM could very well have started (or would soon) being bogged down by the HD market, considering the business model IBM uses. They are primarily R&D, as far as hardware goes. By dumping off the very talented employees they will be free to do whatever... who cares.
The good thing for us is that those employees will now be much less shackled and can once again produce good hard drives.
There was nothing about other companies that can't/don't adapt to new markets. Hard drives are becoming very cheap capacity wise, but the research for even denser plates, faster i/o, and other stuff is still underway. HD manufacturers will get less per unit because of direct competition and cost, and in the mid term will lose even more since these drives are so large that many will not be able to justify buying more. However, that happens with a lot of markets.
IBM is just redifining itself.
They sold the comunications side of the business to Cisco a couple of years ago.
They sell the HDD to Hitachi.
Looks like they want to focus on services and Big Iron. Stuff they do very well.
Technology is only a vehicle. People are the ones that drive it.
I suppose this shouldn't be a huge surprise. Being an ex-IBMer, I can empathsize with the employees in the HDD division, I'm sure from their point of view, it sucks rocks. I used to be in the service division, back when they cut service off like a gangreen limb and started calling us Technology Service Solutions (TSS) as part of a Joint Venture with Kodak.
I suppose the point of my story is that even several years ago, IBM has been looking for the places it can cut the fat, increase the profits. It's what all business folk do. And IBM has done their share of silly business moves that looked like good ideas, (*cough* TSS *cough*). And if it's doesn't work out, those who endure, will get folded back in and things could very well be better than before.
IBM does alot of drive business. How many times have you opened up your Apple G3 or G4, only to find the IBM HDD inside? Or how about your laptop? How many folks have upgraded their laptop HDD's with IBM drives? If IBM is getting out of the HDD business, there must be something in R&D that's pretty darn cool, or IBM's losing their competative edge.
Awk! Pieces of eight. Pieces of eight. Pieces of seven... ERROR: General Protection Fault. [Paroty Error.]
does anyone think like me that a new technology is coming?
ibm sells their hdd business, but according to their
past they really have enough money to keep trying...
is there something that is much better than any hdd, so that ibm doesn't need hdd business anymore...
do you think so?
(buzzing sounds)
C'est "LAISSER FAIRE" or "LAISSER ALLER"!
the Z is used when it is an order!
and there is no eiz in french. C'est pour les putains d'allemans!
Sale Con!!
(pardon my french)
A year ago we purchased four 36GB 10K RPM SSA drives. These are the high end drives that cost $4000 a piece. In the course of 13 months, three of these four drives have FAILED. A 75% failure rate seems a little high for such expensive drives. Don't think I would by IBM ever again.
IBM have a huge research in this field. May be they realized that they almost (in 5-10 years) reached Da Limit?
Or , to throw another conspiracy theory. They found some other chip way to produce massive storage volumes (like optics, I dunno, or something "completely different")?
you would like a more heterogeneous environment like guatemala. pure chaos... anything can happen.
Like quick and easy gringo kidnapping and ransom.
Ironically, it was the Free Unixes that were first to take advantage of the Command Tagged Queueing on the Deskstars. In fact that was one of their major selling points (until the whole quality control fiasco hit). To this day I don't think any other manufacturer has CTQ support on any ATA drive.
I read the internet for the articles.
Basically, what IBM is saying is that the market for storage based on mechanical devices will be gone in the not so distant future. Expect IBM to be a major player in one if not all of these disruptive technologies:
1. Solid State non-volatile memory
2. Bio-electro non-volatile memory
3. Nano-MEMs based non-volatile memory
All this is good, and just a sign that the guys up top at Big Blue know when to get out of what should have been the first thing to be replaced in PC's.......a moving mechanism and primary point of failure in computers.
Real men don't need signitures!!!
How come everyone that reads this site automaticly thinks that they are gods gift to everything, they know everything, and they have all the correct answers for everything? I have read through a lot of the comments on this site and you all don't know jack about anything... I am the only one that knows anything
I'm suprised that nobody saw this coming sooner. On a recent shipment of IBM PCs (before the announcement), I noticed that all of their hard drives were made by Maxtor.
I certainly hope that this closure does not effect IBM's R&D on some of their next-gen storage devices (extremely-high-density hard disks, holographic storage, microdrive, etc). Those devices showed promise, and IBM is probably the only company capable of continuing such efforts (Their efforts could have equaled those of PARC)
So long, and thanks for the disk!
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
A nifty possibility is that the crystal could be removeable. Storing gigabytes on a sugar cube sized crystal with no moving parts reminds me of the Anne McCaffrey novel PartnerShip, which also features a villain who runs a galactic monopoly with a remarkable resemblance to Microsoft.
The White House acknowledges the Green House effect!
o_O
CTQ support on ata disks? ?!?
This is the first I've heard of this, got a URL?
Hard drives are slow. I want my files, except music and porn, to be stored in some kind of non-volatile RAM.
The shareholder is always right.
so what's the slashdot populace's recommendation for good IDE hard drives then?
I am serious. The last 3 IBM HD's that found thier way to me died within weeks. I dont know what they changed.. but.
Long live Fujitsu drives.. my favorite!
I can program myself out of a Hello World Contest!!
Every hard drive I have ever bought or planned on buying was IBM. Ultrastars for my Macs and Deskstars for my PC's at home, Ultrastars for everything at work. This upsets me greatly. I have never had an IBM drive fail. I know there were some problems recently, but every company has a problem from time to time. I work for IBM Global Services, and this upsets me.
Ummmmm the press release doesn't say anything about IBM giving up their patent rights to Hitatchi. I highly doubt they would stop collecting royalties from this lucrative area of computing.
Yes, that's right. You can get ten CEOs for the price of one from India. I'd like to see this as a new trend. No more golden handshakes.
That's exactly how it feels you fuckwad shits.
volume holographic storage nanotechnology
will be the next revolutionary storage.
http://colossalstorage.net
I had two, that's right TWO IBM deskstar 60GXP drives fail on me this weekend. They were only 6 months old. Sure they were going 24x7, but that's still a long way from the claimed 100,000 MTBF! Hitachi makes much higher quality drives IMHO.
When someone links to GRC.com, you know they're a troll.
The only thing that's happened here is a lot of people will be getting their paychecks from a different bank, and will no longer be required to wear a tie to work every day.
The hard drive market is not one so small or static that the loss of one manufacturer will affect the market in a negative way. This is merely a business decision, where IBM feels it can pursue its business goals most effectively by having the division exist as a seperate entity.
I wish all the employees good luck during the inevitable mass firings that will occur during the restructuring (they're not layoffs when you have no plans to recall the affected employees), and good luck inventing, and productizing the next big thing in storage technology. Here's a goal for you: a storage system for an HDTiVo.
deskstar drives are meant to be run roughly 8 hrs a day. They are ment for desktop business use in systems that get turned off when the user leaves.
Running them 24x7 will kill them faster, and they are not designed to handle it.
Another big issue is heat inside the case.
I have a Late-2001 iBook (20GB/128mb/600mhz). Its hard drive is an IBM Travelstar 30GN. I was wondering if notebook hard drives are standard or not, so if in a few years I could upgrade it?
I was thinking about putting the 48gb model in this notebook in November when my warranty expires. Is something like this feasable?
God save our Queen, and Heaven bless The Maple Leaf Forever!
It is way more than 5 years ago that I first heard of IBM doing research on holographic storage. At that time they could, I believe, hold somewhere between several hundred GigaBytes of data to several TerraBytes of data in a matrix the size of a sugar cube. What ever happened to that? It seemed to have such great potential, so why isn't it available yet, or even mentioned all that much..?
Admittedly, I haven't scoured the net before posting this, but none of the magazines I subscribe to has mentioned anything about holographic storage in at least 5 years...?
Can anyone explain this to me?
Regards,
Having been on the inside at Hitachi Data Systems for more than a decade through the late 80s and into the mid-90s, I had an "up close and personal" view of the relative advances in HDD technology and R&D. At the time, the advanced research being done at Odawara Works (the home of Hitachi hard disk technology) drew from among the best researchers of almost every division of Hitachi, with the possible exception of the Nuclear Power and Locomotive divisions. In addition, the manufacturing technology employed was considerably more advanced than that of IBM at the time. As a result, MTBF numbers for Hitachi drives were many times those of comparable IBM drives.
Naturally, the dynamics of the business changed when EMC was able to achieve performance and overall system reliability levels that were more than acceptable with integral-cache, RAID-like architectures, able to be built and sold at very economical prices.
As early as 1993/4, many observers predicted that IBM would eventually have to get out of the disk business, as their cost to maintain acceptable reliability and performance would make their product non-competitive. The prediction was that it would be sold to Hitachi, and I've heard that prediction repeated several times in the intervening years. It's also not surprising, nor likely coincidental, that a key executive in the senior stratosphere of Hitachi these days used to be the Chief Engineer in Odawara Works.
Nice move Naruse-san! Omedetou gozaimasu! Ganbatte ne!
I thought AT&T was the death star?
All IBM HDD patents are being transferred to the new company. All research folks that worked >50% on HDD technology are included in the deal. You guys just don't get it. Its about MAKING MONEY! IBM's HDD business hasn't been as profitable as other divisions (mostly because they spent half as much on R&D as Seagate). Global services makes tons of cash and doesn't lose money if a product is late to market. IBM digs that. Eventually, IBM is going to suffer from getting away from hardware too much because they lose credibility. In the short term, its a cost cutting measure that makes analysts happy and helps them make next quarter's targets. Now that uncle Hitachi is going to open the purse strings a little, watch out Seagate!
I used to work for IBM.
I think I'm going to dump the stock I have.
The employees signed contracts with IBM, not Hitachi. For IBM to place itself on the outside, in the realm affected by the non-compete clause, without the employees' consent, and at the behest of a third party, is probably illegal, and is definitely unethical. This kind of crap makes me really question my support of IBM's involvement in Linux.
Does no one but me see the real import of this move by IBM. 1) Why would they sell off patents worth millions? 2) What do they have in the pipe that would replace hard drives?
1) Smart technology companies dump technology that is on the way out. IBM is saying here that hard drives are on there way out and will be dissappearing in three years.
2) Solid state storage. In a few years we'll all be using 'flash crystals' or some other 50Gig per portable ounce technology. Hard drives are headed the way of bubble memory, and good riddance. They have been the bottleneck of systems for way to long now.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
In the FreeBSD 4.2 Release notes. Scroll down to the "Tagged Queueing on ATA disks" section.
I read the internet for the articles.