Bank Dumps Quantum Gear: Page 2 of 5

After the article appeared, Michael Zeglin, director of public relations for Quantum's Storage Solutions Group, contacted us with some additional comments. Zeglin says that the service call in question was for a library no longer under contract with Quantum. He also claims that the delay was on the part of Bank of America's staff in giving Quantum the approval to perform the work. "For any libraries not under service contract, a purchase order is requested from the customer before service is provided," he wrote in an email to Byte and Switch. "This is industry standard."

Mixer, however, claims that this wasn't the only time Quantum dragged its feet before getting a job done. The tape vendor’s sluggish, uncooperative attitude is more the rule than the exception, he says. Mixer says he has had to hound Quantum to fix two other P1000 libraries as well: one in Atlanta and one in St. Louis. In both cases, he says, it took the company days to respond. [Zeglin, responding after the original article was published, claims that Quantum has no recent record of any service call from Bank of America in St. Louis.]

“If I have a piece of equipment that’s still under contract with them, I’ll talk to them,” Mixer says. “But after that, if I don’t have to call them again, I never will.”

And that’s not the end of the bad news for Quantum, which has seen the momentum for its DLT tape products dwindle in the face of competitors’ LTO and AIT tape formats, as well as an intensifying onslaught of ever newer and cheaper disk products (see Quantum Tape Drives Speak Up and Quantum Tapes Up Roadmap). The investment banking side of Bank of America -- which makes up only about 2 percent of the bank's overall headcount but brings in roughly 40 percent of its revenues -- appears to be following the lead of the larger commercial banking division in its tape purchasing decisions. “The bank’s pretty much an 800-pound gorilla when it comes to vendor decisions,” Mixer says. [Responding after the original version of this article was posted, Mary Waller, media relations manager at Bank of America, says that Mixer "does not make vendor relationship decisions."]

But let’s start at the beginning. Bank of America's investment banking group is in the midst of a huge renovation of its mainly direct-attached storage (DAS) environments. At the data center where Mixer is located in Charlotte, N.C., there are about 2,000 DAS servers and about 150 Network Appliance Inc. (Nasdaq: NTAP) filers. And that’s just one of seven data centers run by the investment bank in the U.S. The company has about 7,500 servers in total.