Hewlett-Packard Co. has sped up many of its storage device offerings by upgrading to Ultra3. Ultra3 is a faster flavor of SCSL the interface among the components of a central site. Ultra2, which is the most widely used flavor of SCSI today, moves data at 40 MB per second; Ultra3 increases that to 160 MB per second.
Libraries should continue to specify performance, rather than specific technology, because conformity to the requirements of a response times table can be the basis for requiring a vendor to deal with the problem. Specifying Ultra3 does not guarantee response times will be as fast as a library needs because other deficiencies can exist in the configuration or software. Nevertheless, comparing vendor hardware configurations is key in selecting software because a few vendors minimally configure many of the components of a system.
