Bank of America's investment banking group has ditched a services contract with its long-time tape library supplier Quantum Corp. (NYSE: DSS) for some of its data center locations -- not because the price wasn't right, but because the service was severely subpar, according to Thomas Mixer, a manager with the banking group's data storage and recovery team.
And the bank is also powering down some of its older Quantum equipment and bringing in tapes and libraries from Storage Technology Corp. (StorageTek) (NYSE: STK) to replace them.
We were running into a lot of grief with Quantum, Mixer says.
He says that when Bank of America had a Quantum ATL P1000 library go down in its disaster recovery site in Columbia, S.C., it took a week of back-and-forth to get Quantum out there to fix the library. "And I wasnt trying to negotiate with them on price. I just said, I need someone out there to fix that library as soon as possible, and it still took a week for them to get there.
Byte and Switch gave Quantum the chance to respond to Bank of America's allegations before the original version of this story was published. The company sent us this statement: "In June 2001, Bank of America contracted Quantum to design and implement a SAN solution that included the sale of tape automation libraries. Although not a strategic supplier to them at that time, Quantum was selected because of its expertise in Fibre Channel connectivity. At this time, Quantum maintains a service and support relationship with the company for the tape libraries."