Pinetree Peripherals was originally conceived as a wholly owned subsidiary of Storagetek, for the purpose of providing support for tape products deemed end-of life. Although the original proposal was never culminated, Pinetree Peripherals was created and our original mission was implemented. Since 1992, Pinetree Peripherals has and continues to support Storagetek tape drive products from the 9-track family featuring the 1900 series, through modern tape libraries based on LTO3 tape drives.
These legacy tape drive and tape library products, while orphaned through the merger and acquisition of Storagetek remain the focus of Pinetree Peripherals 1nc. Pinetree Peripherals has replacement parts from the smallest component to the main FRU’s. Theses parts are tested using a quality process developed with ISO 9002 guidelines. Pinetree has repair capability for the 1960, 1950, 2920, 9914, M490E, 9840 series and 9940 series of units, representing the Storagetek tape product lines from 1980’s through today.
Tape storage, while appearing archaic by the latest and greatest standards, is still one of the most cost-effective and long-lived backup solutions for the enterprise as well as for small and medium businesses. A case in point: data that was archived on tape and stored in a climate-controlled storage has been recovered into a system and integrated into a 2003 project. These tapes that were written during the mid 1960’s gathering high altitude weather data. Pinetree provided the tape hardware and HBA to read the data into a Sun SPARC 5 and add it to an existing data set. The PPI maintenance team supported the equipment for the full duration of the project. That project was completed successfully, demonstrating that data stored on tape can be recovered and used after extended periods of off-line storage.