Tandberg Data ASA (Oslo: TAD) has taken over a NAS subsidiary in an effort to organize itself as a new power in tape and disk storage.
Last month, the Oslo-based company exchanged 600,000 shares of its stock for the remaining 45 percent minority stake in InoStor Corp. (Oslo: TAD). According to European news sources, the parent also will pay up to $1.5 million in royalties related to licenses of InoStor technology.
Big deal? No. But the world of storage is full of surprises. And Tandberg Data, up to now a minor player in the tape drive and autoloader segment, is bent on getting a bigger storage act.
Tandberg's ambitions started back in 2002, when Tandberg Data Inc., which distributes Tandberg Data's tape drives, autoloaders, and tape libraries in North America, bought Land-5 Corp., a disk-storage appliance firm, and became InoStor.
InoStor, still under the same name and now wholly owned by Tandberg Data, sells NAS systems and a technology called RAIDn that boosts redundancy among multiple drives in disk-backup systems (see InoStor Launches RAID Algorithm, InoStor Granted RAID Patent, and New Roads to Reliability).
