Iomega Corporation (later LenovoEMC) was a company that produced external, portable, and networked data storage products. Established in the 1980s in

Roy, Utah Roy is a city in Weber County, Utah, United States, on the west side of Interstate 15 in Utah, Interstate 15. The 2020 United States Census, population in 2020 was 39,306; an increase of 6.6% from 36,884 at the 2010 United States Census, 2010 ce ...

, United States, Iomega sold more than 410 million digital storage drives and disks, including the

Zip drive The Zip drive is a removable floppy disk storage system that was announced by Iomega in 1994 and began shipping in March 1995. Considered medium-to-high-capacity at the time of its release, Zip disks were originally launched with capacities ...

floppy disk system. Formerly a public company, it was acquired by

EMC Corporation EMC Corporation (stylized as EMC²) was an American multinational corporation headquartered in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, which sold data storage device, data storage, information security, virtualization, analytics, cloud computing and other pro ...

in 2008, and then by

Lenovo Lenovo Group Limited, trading as Lenovo ( , zh, c=联想, p=Liánxiǎng), is a Chinese multinational technology company specializing in designing, manufacturing, and marketing consumer electronics, personal computers, software, servers, conv ...

, which rebranded the product line as LenovoEMC, until discontinuation in 2018.

History

Iomega started in

, U.S. in 1980, with the original founders Jerome Paul Johnson, David Bailey, and David Norton. Its headquarters were moved to

San Diego San Diego ( , ) is a city on the Pacific coast of Southern California, adjacent to the Mexico–United States border. With a population of over 1.4 million, it is the List of United States cities by population, eighth-most populous city in t ...

, California in 2001. For many years, it was a significant name in the data storage industry. Iomega's most famous product, the Zip drive, offered relatively large amounts of storage on portable, high-capacity floppy disks. The original Zip disk's 100MB capacity was a huge improvement over the decades-long standard of 1.44MB standard floppy disks. The Zip drive became a common internal and external peripheral for

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

-compatible and

Macintosh Mac is a brand of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 1984. The name is short for Macintosh (its official name until 1999), a reference to the McIntosh (apple), McIntosh apple. The current product lineup inclu ...

personal computers. However, Zip drives sometimes failed after a short period, which failure was commonly referred to as the "click of death." This problem, combined with competition from CD-RW drives, caused Zip drive sales to decline dramatically, even after introducing larger 250MB and 750MB versions. Iomega eventually launched a CD-RW drive. Without the revenue from its proprietary storage disks and drives, Iomega's sales and profits declined considerably. Iomega's stock price, which was over $100 at its height in the 1990s, fell to around $2 in the mid-2000s. Trying to find a niche, Iomega released devices such as the HipZip MP3 player, the FotoShow Digital Image Center, and numerous external hard drives, optical drives, and NAS products. None of these products were successful. In 2012, reporter Vincent Verweij of Dutch broadcaster Katholieke Radio Omroep revealed that at least 16,000 Iomega NAS devices were publicly exposing their users' files on the Internet. This was due to Iomega having disabled password security by default. KLM,

ING Group ING Group N.V. () is a Dutch multinational corporation, multinational banking and financial services corporation headquartered in Amsterdam. Its primary businesses are retail banking, direct banking, commercial banking, investment banking, whol ...

, and Ballast Nedam all had confidential material leaked in this manner. Iomega USA acknowledged the problem and said future models (starting February 2013) would have password security enabled by default. The company said it would clearly instruct users about the risks of unsecured data.

Acquisition by EMC

On April 8, 2008,

announced plans to acquire Iomega for . The acquisition was completed in June 2008, making Iomega the

SOHO SoHo, short for "South of Houston Street, Houston Street", is a neighborhood in Lower Manhattan, New York City. Since the 1970s, the neighborhood has been the location of many artists' lofts and art galleries, art installations such as The Wall ...

/ SMB arm of EMC. EMC kept the Iomega brand name alive with products such as the StorCenter NAS line, ScreenPlay TV Link adapter, and v.Clone virtualization software (a Iomega-branded version of VMware's

Player Player may refer to: Role or adjective * Player (game), a participant in a game or sport ** Gamer, a player in video and tabletop games ** Athlete, a player in sports ** Player character, a character in a video game or role playing game who i ...

virtualization-solution).

Joint venture with Lenovo: LenovoEMC

In 2013, EMC (before the Dell purchase) formed a joint venture with Chinese technology company

, named LenovoEMC, that took over Iomega's business. LenovoEMC rebranded all of Iomega's products under its name. LenovoEMC designed products for small and medium-sized businesses that could not afford enterprise-class data storage. LenovoEMC was a part of a broader partnership between the two companies announced in August 2012. The partnership also included an effort to develop x86-based servers and allowing Lenovo to act as an OEM for some EMC hardware. LenovoEMC was a part of Lenovo's Enterprise Products Group before it ultimately dissolved with the EMC Dell acquisition. In November 2013, Lenovo announced the construction of a research and development facility near

São Paulo, Brazil SAO or Sao may refer to: Places * Sao civilisation, in Middle Africa from 6th century BC to 16th century AD * Sao, a town in Boussé Department, Burkina Faso * Serb Autonomous Regions (''Srpska autonomna oblast'', SAO), during the breakup of Yu ...

. This facility was dedicated to enterprise software and supporting LenovoEMC's development of high-end servers and cloud storage. Construction would cost $100 million and about 100 people would be employed at the facility. It would be located in the University of Campinas Science and Technology Park, about 60 miles from São Paulo. Later in 2016 the Brazil facility was downscaled and relocated elsewhere.

1980–1999

*1980: April 1, Iomega FoundedIomega Corporation
30 years of unstoppable innovation
/ref> *1982: Released First

Bernoulli Box The Bernoulli Box (or simply Bernoulli, named after Bernoulli's principle) is a high-capacity (at the time of release) removable disk storage system that was Iomega's first widely known product. It was first released in 1982. Overview The orig ...

Drive (10MB) * 1985: Released Bernoulli Box Drive for the Macintosh platform (5MB) *1987: September, Shipped first Bernoulli Box II model (20 MB) *1988: Released Bernoulli Box 44 MB drive *1991: July, Shipped Bernoulli Box 90 MB drive *1992: October, Shipped Bernoulli MultiDisk 150 drive. *1994: October, Shipped Bernoulli 230 drive. *1995: January, Shipped

Iomega Ditto The Ditto drive series was a proprietary magnetic tape data storage system released by Iomega during the 1990s. It was marketed as a tape backup device for personal computers. They were released in several capacities ranging from the original ...

Tape Drive A tape drive is a data storage device that reads and writes data on a magnetic tape. Magnetic-tape data storage is typically used for offline, archival data storage. Tape media generally has a favorable unit cost and long archival stability. ...

*1995: March, Released Zip 100MB Drive *1995: December, Shipped

Jaz Drive The Jaz drive is a removable hard disk storage system sold by the Iomega company from 1995 to 2002. Following the success of the Iomega Zip drive, which in its original version stores data on high-capacity floppy disks with 100 MB nominal capa ...

1GB Drive *1997: June, Announced Buz Multimedia Producer *1997: November, Unveiled Clik! 40MB Drive *1998: February, Shipped Jaz 2GB Drive *1998: December, Shipped Zip 250MB Drive *1999: Shipped First Internal

CD-RW RW (Compact Disc-Rewritable) is a digital media, digital optical disc data storage device, storage format introduced by Ricoh in 1997. A CD-RW compact disc (CD-RWs) can be written, read, erased, and re-written. CD-RWs, as opposed to CDs, r ...

Drive

2000–present

*2000: September, Launched HipZip Digital Audio Player *2000: October, Shipped FotoShow Digital Image Center *2000: December, Shipped First External CD-RW Drive *2001: January, Announced Peerless Drive System *2001: March, Shipped DataSafe Network Attached Storage (NAS) Server * 2001: July, eliminating .. one-third of its work force, planning to move from Utah to California. *2002: April, Announced Portable and External Hard Drive Family *2002: August, Shipped Zip 750MB Drive *2002: November, Launched USB Mini Flash Drive *2003: March, Launched iStorage Online Storage *2003: March, Announced External Standard Floppy Drive *2003: June, Announced first

DVD-RW DVD recordable and DVD rewritable are a collection of optical disc formats that can be written to by a DVD recorder and by computers using a DVD writer. The "recordable" discs are write-once read-many (WORM) media, where as "rewritable" discs a ...

drive, shipped 50 millionth Zip drive *2003: November, Introduced Super DVD QuikTouch *2004: February, Shipped CD-RW/DVD-ROM 7-in-1 Card Reader *2004: April, Shipped REV 35GB Drive, shipped Floppy Plus 7-in-1 Card Reader *2004: September, Introduced Wireless NAS Server *2004: October, Introduced REV Autoloader 1000 *2005: November, Announced ScreenPlay Multimedia Drive *2006: September, Introduced desktop RAID storage *2008: January, Announced eGo Portable Hard Drive *2008: April, EMC acquired Iomega *2008: April, Announced ScreenPlay HD Multimedia Drive *2008: May, Announced eGo Desktop Hard Drive *2008: August, Introduced ScreenPlay TV Link Multimedia Adapter *2008: September, Announced the new eGo Helium Portable Hard Drive *2008: October, Announced StorCenter ix2, announced ScreenPlay Pro HD Multimedia Drive *2009: January, Shipped Iomega Home Media Network Hard Drive *2009: February, Announced StorCenter ix4-100 Server *2009: April, Ships the StorCenter ix4-200r NAS *2009: May, New Generation of eGo Portable Hard Drives *2009: August, Announced StorCenter ix4-200d NAS *2009: October, Announced StorCenter ix2-200 *2010: January, Shipped Iomega iConnect Wireless Data Station *2010: January, Announced ScreenPlay Media Player, Director Edition; announced v.Clone Technology: Take your PC Virtually Anywhere *2010: April, Iomega celebrates 30 years *2010: May, Announced StorCenter ix12-300r NAS *2010: June, Introduced Skin Hard Drive by Iomega *2011: March, introduced Cloud Edition IX series *2013: January, Iomega Corporation was renamed to LenovoEMC Limited, which is a joint venture between Lenovo Group Limited and EMC Corporation. Lenovo owns the majority stake in the new company.

Products

Iomega designed and manufactured a range of products intended to compete with and ultimately replace the 3.5"

floppy disk A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy, a diskette, or a disk) is a type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined with a ...

, notably the

. Initial Iomega products connected to a computer via

SCSI Small Computer System Interface (SCSI, ) is a set of standards for physically connecting and transferring data between computers and peripheral devices, best known for its use with storage devices such as hard disk drives. SCSI was introduced ...

parallel port In computing, a parallel port is a type of interface found on early computers ( personal and otherwise) for connecting peripherals. The name refers to the way the data is sent; parallel ports send multiple bits of data at once (paralle ...

; later models used

USB Universal Serial Bus (USB) is an industry standard, developed by USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF), for digital data transmission and power delivery between many types of electronics. It specifies the architecture, in particular the physical ...

and

FireWire IEEE 1394 is an interface standard for a serial bus for high-speed communications and isochronous real-time data transfer. It was developed in the late 1980s and early 1990s by Apple in cooperation with a number of companies, primarily Sony a ...

(1994).

PX4-400d

The 400d was a multi-bay

network-attached storage Network-attached storage (NAS) is a file-level computer data storage server connected to a computer network providing data access to a Heterogeneous computing, heterogeneous group of clients. In this context, the term "NAS" can refer to both th ...

(NAS) device. The 400d was powered by an

Intel Atom Intel Atom is a line of IA-32 and x86-64 instruction set ultra-low-voltage processors by Intel Corporation designed to reduce electric consumption and power dissipation in comparison with ordinary processors of the Intel Core series. Atom is m ...

processor running at 2.13 gigahertz, had 2 gigabytes of RAM, and a

SATA 3 SATA (Serial AT Attachment) is a computer bus interface that connects host bus adapters to mass storage devices such as hard disk drives, optical drives, and solid-state drives. Serial ATA succeeded the earlier Parallel ATA (PATA) standard t ...

controller capable of moving data at 6 gigabits per second. The HDMI-out function enabled monitoring live feeds from surveillance cameras. The unit can be set up and managed without a PC using an external display, keyboard, and mouse. The 400d is LenovoEMC's first product sold with its LifeLine 4.1 software, which added functions such as a domain mode, enhanced Active Directory support and a more robust SDK.

McAfee McAfee Corp. ( ), formerly known as McAfee Associates, Inc. from 1987 to 1997 and 2004 to 2014, Network Associates Inc. from 1997 to 2004, and Intel Security Group from 2014 to 2017, is an American proprietary software company focused on online ...

ePolicy Orchestrator was included for centralized security management. All THINK-branded systems from Lenovo pre-installed with Windows 8.1 included LenovoEMC Storage Connector in order make discovery and set-up of the 400d and other LenovoEMC NAS devices smoother.

Lenovo Beacon Home Cloud Centre

At the 2014 International CES, LenovoEMC announced the Lenovo Beacon Home Cloud Centre. The Beacon is a storage device that allows remote sharing of data such as music, pictures, and video. The Beacon allows music and video streaming to multiple devices. Android phones and tablets can be used to control the Beacon. It also has an HDMI port to allow connection to a television or monitor. Up to 6 terabytes of storage, RAID 0 and 1, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth are all supported.

References

External links

* {{Major information storage companies 1980 establishments in Utah 2008 disestablishments in Utah 2008 mergers and acquisitions American companies established in 1980 American companies disestablished in 2008 Computer companies established in 1980 Computer companies disestablished in 2008 Computer storage companies Defunct computer companies based in California Defunct computer companies of the United States Defunct computer hardware companies Defunct manufacturing companies based in California Defunct technology companies based in California EMC Corporation Former joint ventures Hard disk drives Lenovo Manufacturing companies established in 1980 Manufacturing companies disestablished in 2008 Technology companies based in San Diego