 | |
| Company type | Subsidiary |
|---|---|
| Industry | Data storage |
| Founded | 1992 |
| Defunct | 1995 |
| Fate | Restructured |
| Successor | IBM Storage Systems Division |
Key people | Ed Zschau, CEO |
| Parent | International Business Machines |
AdStar (an acronym for Advanced Storage and Retrieval) was a division of IBM that encompassed all the company's storage products including disk, tape and optical storage systems and storage software.
In 1992 IBM combined their Storage Products businesses comprising eleven sites in eight countries into this division. [1] On its creation, AdStar became the largest information storage business in the world. It had a revenue of $6.11 billion, of which $500 million were sales to other manufacturers (OEM sales), and generated a gross profit of about $440 million (before taxes and restructuring). [2]
To provide additional autonomy—thereby further encouraging OEM sales—IBM established AdStar as a wholly owned subsidiary in April 1993, with outsider Ed Zschau as chairman and CEO. [2] To some observers this appeared to be an admission by IBM that the storage subsidiary no longer provided a strategic advantage by providing proprietary devices for its mainframe products, [2] and that it was being positioned to be sold off as a part of then the IBM chairman John Akers' business strategy. The replacement of Akers by Lou Gerstner in April 1993 changed the strategy from spinout to turnaround, [3] but the disk drive business under Zschau continued to be troubled, declining to $3 billion in 1995. [4]
Zschau left AdStar in October 1995, replaced by IBM insider Jim Vanderslice. [4] The AdStar division was dismembered thereafter; the AdStar Distributed Storage Manager (ADSM) was renamed Tivoli Storage Manager in 1999, [5] and the disk drive business component was sold off to Hitachi in 2003. [6]
Maxtor Corporation was an American computer hard disk drive manufacturer. Founded in 1982, it was the third largest hard disk drive manufacturer in the world before being purchased by Seagate in 2006.
Hitachi, Ltd. is a Japanese multinational conglomerate founded in 1910 and headquartered in Chiyoda, Tokyo. The company is active in a range of industries, including digital systems, power and renewable energy, railway systems, healthcare products, and financial systems. The company was founded as an electrical machinery manufacturing subsidiary of the Kuhara Mining Plant in Hitachi, Ibaraki by engineer Namihei Odaira in 1910. It started as an independent company under its current name in 1920.
Western Digital Corporation is an American data storage company headquartered in San Jose, California. It has a decades-long history in the electronics industry as an integrated circuit and data memory technology developer. It is one of the world's largest computer hard disk drive (HDD) manufacturers, along with producing solid-state drives (SSDs) and flash memory devices.
Seagate Technology Holdings plc is an American data storage company. It was incorporated in 1978 as Shugart Technology and commenced business in 1979. Since 2010, the company has been incorporated in Dublin, Ireland, with operational headquarters in Fremont, California, United States.
Louis Vincent Gerstner Jr. is the Chairman of Gerstner Philanthropies, a family foundation that has invested over $300 million in Biomedical Research, Education, Environment and Helping Hands. He is considered an icon of American business, and is best known for his tenure as chairman of the board and chief executive officer of IBM from April 1993 until 2002, when he retired as CEO in March and chairman in December. He is largely credited with the turnaround of IBM and for reclaiming its reputation for technical leadership.
Samuel J. "Sam" Palmisano is a former president and the eighth chief executive officer of IBM until January 2012. He also served as chairman of the company until October 1, 2012.
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Edwin Van Wyck Zschau is an American educator who represented California's 12th District in the United States House of Representatives from 1983 to 1987. In 1986 he ran as the Republican candidate for a seat in the United States Senate. He prevailed in a crowded Republican primary that included, among others, conservative commentator Bruce Herschensohn, Los Angeles County supervisor Michael D. Antonovich and Congresswoman Bobbi Fiedler, but then lost to incumbent Democrat Alan Cranston by a narrow margin.
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International Business Machines (IBM) is a multinational corporation specializing in computer technology and information technology consulting. Headquartered in Armonk, New York, the company originated from the amalgamation of various enterprises dedicated to automating routine business transactions, notably pioneering punched card-based data tabulating machines and time clocks. In 1911, these entities were unified under the umbrella of the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR).
sTec, Inc., was an American computer data storage technology company headquartered in California. It had research and development, sales, support and manufacturing sites in China, India, Japan, Malaysia, Silicon Valley (USA), and Taiwan.
This article presents a timeline of events in the history of 16-bit x86 DOS-family disk operating systems from 1980 to present. Non-x86 operating systems named "DOS" are not part of the scope of this timeline.
Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) was a provider of modular mid-range and high-end computer data storage systems, software, and services. Its operations are now a part of Hitachi Vantara.
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International Business Machines Corporation, nicknamed Big Blue, is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York and present in over 175 countries. It is a publicly traded company and one of the 30 companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. IBM is the largest industrial research organization in the world, with 19 research facilities across a dozen countries, having held the record for most annual U.S. patents generated by a business for 29 consecutive years from 1993 to 2021.
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