INDUSTRY WATCH

Iomega debuts Ditto MaxIomega Corp. last week announced Ditto Max a tape backup drive which supports 3.5G 5G 7G or 10G compressed-capacity cartridges.

Ditto Max's multiple-capacity feature is designed to prevent users from outgrowing their tape backup gear as their hard disks increase in capacity. "A lot of people are looking for a way to prevent obsolesce " said Keith Slankard director of markets and channels for the Americas at Iomega Roy Utah. The product has a market price of $299.

The product offers Flash!File storage which provides 150M of storage that allows users to access specified files with five-second access. Other features include an optional product called Ditto Tools NT which manages software compression scheduling of unattended backups high-speed backups and other issues for users migrating to Windows NT. Ditto Tools NT is priced at $19.95.

Ditto Max is expected to ship in September. The product will be available through the following General Services Administration resellers: AmeriData BTG Inc. Government Technology Services Inc. and Sysorex Information Systems Inc.

RDI offers ruggedized portable workstationRDI Computer Corp. last week introduced a ruggedized version of its PowerLite Turbo 170 a portable workstation based on Sun Microsystems Inc.'s SPARC processors and Solaris operating system.

The Ruggedized PowerLite features an advanced air-cooling system and aluminum alloy case. System components are "sealed and toughened" to survive the shock vibration dust humidity and temperature variation of tactical environments according to RDI.

The system comes with a 170 MHz TurboSPARC processor a 12.1-inch high-resolution display TGX graphics acceleration 256M of memory 512K of secondary cache and a 9.1G removable hard disk storage. The system also features a removable keyboard floppy disk drive and a PC Card slot with options for a CD-ROM drive and a 4mm digital audio tape drive.

RDI's portable workstations are available through a Navy Tactical Advanced Computer blanket purchase agreement through Control Concepts Corp. through Sun's Third Party Offering program and other contracts.

Cray sells Origin 2000 to NCSACray Research Inc. announced this month that the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) has purchased an additional 128-processor Cray Origin2000 configuration for its computational science and engineering users.

When combined with its existing 128 processors NCSA will have one of the largest Cray Origin2000 configurations in the world. Recently named one of the National Science Foundation's two lead partners in the Partnership for Advanced Computing Infrastructure NCSA will be creating a national information infrastructure prototype to enable higher-level computational science and engineering.

NCSA completed the initial testing of its new system with the University of Minnesota's Laboratory for Computational Science and Engineering. A nine-day run on NCSA's 128-processor Cray Origin2000 configuration created a 3-D simulation of a star roughly the same size as the sun.

The simulation allowed NCSA and Cray to verify and fine tune file systems network interfaces system settings and subsystems under real-life computing conditions. Cray is a subsidiary of Silicon Graphics Inc. - Compiled by Heather Harreld John Moore and John Stein Monroe.