Iomega (later LenovoEMC) produced external, portable, and networked data storage products. Established in the 1980s in Roy, Utah, 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 introduced by Iomega in late 1994. Considered medium-to-high-capacity at the time of its release, Zip disks were originally launched with capacities of 100 MB, then 250 ...

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

EMC Corporation Dell EMC (EMC Corporation until 2016) is an American multinational corporation headquartered in Hopkinton, Massachusetts and Round Rock, Texas, United States. Dell EMC sells data storage, information security, virtualization, analytics, cloud c ...

in 2008, and then by

Lenovo Lenovo Group Limited, often shortened to Lenovo ( , ), is a Chinese multinational technology company specializing in designing, manufacturing, and marketing consumer electronics, personal computers, software, business solutions, and related se ...

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

History

Iomega started in Roy, Utah, U.S. in 1980 and moved its headquarters to

San Diego San Diego ( , ; ) is a city on the Pacific Ocean coast of Southern California located immediately adjacent to the Mexico–United States border. With a 2020 population of 1,386,932, it is the eighth most populous city in the United States ...

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

Macintosh The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc. Macs are known for their ease of use and minimalist designs, and are popular among students, creative professionals, and software en ...

personal computers. However, Zip disks sometimes failed after a short period, 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 disk versions. Iomega eventually launched a CD-RW drive. Without the revenue from its proprietary storage cartridges, 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 Iomega having disabled password security by default. KLM,

ING Group The ING Group ( nl, ING Groep) 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 ...

, 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 is an area of the City of Westminster, part of the West End of London. Originally a fashionable district for the aristocracy, it has been one of the main entertainment districts in the capital since the 19th century. The area was develo ...

/ 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.

Joint venture with Lenovo: LenovoEMC

In 2013, EMC (part of Dell) 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 designs products for small and medium-sized businesses that cannot afford enterprise-class data storage. LenovoEMC is part of a broader partnership between the two companies announced in August 2012. The partnership also includes an effort to develop x86-based servers and allowing Lenovo to act as an OEM for some EMC hardware. Lenovo is expected to benefit from the relatively high profit margins of the NAS market. LenovoEMC is part of Lenovo's Enterprise Products Group. 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 * Saco Transportation Center (station code SAO), a train station in Saco, Maine, U. ...

. This facility would be dedicated to enterprise software and supporting LenovoEMC's development of high-end servers and cloud storage. Construction would cost $100 million and about 100 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.

1980–1999

*1980: April 1, Iomega FoundedIomega Corporation
30 years of unstoppable innovation
/ref> *1982: Released First Bernoulli Box Drive (10MB) *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

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 a long archival stability. ...

*1995: March, Released

Zip Zip, Zips or ZIP may refer to: Common uses * ZIP Code, USPS postal code * Zipper or zip, clothing fastener Science and technology Computing * ZIP (file format), a compressed archive file format ** zip, a command-line program from Info-ZIP * Zi ...

100MB Drive *1995: December, Shipped Jaz Drive 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 CD-RW (Compact Disc-Rewritable) is a digital optical disc storage format introduced in 1997. A CD-RW compact disc (CD-RWs) can be written, read, erased, and re-written. CD-RWs, as opposed to CDs, require specialized readers that have sens ...

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 optical disc recording technologies. Both terms describe DVD optical discs that can be written to by a DVD recorder, whereas only 'rewritable' discs are able to erase and rewrite data. Data is written ('b ...

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, or a diskette) is an obsolescent 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 ...

, 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. The SCSI standards define commands, protocols, electrical, optical and logical interface ...

or parallel port; later models used USB 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 (as opposed to block-level storage) computer data storage server connected to a computer network providing data access to a heterogeneous group of clients. The term "NAS" can refer to both the techn ...

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

Intel Atom Intel Atom is the brand name for 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 ...

processor running at 2.13 gigahertz, had 2 gigabytes of RAM, and a SATA 3 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 global computer security software company head ...

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.http://www.channelprosmb.com/article/lenovoemcs_debuts_improved_ix4_400d_four_bay_nas_at_ces_and_weve_got_all_th

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 manufacturing companies based in California Defunct technology companies based in California Dell EMC Hard disk drives Joint ventures Lenovo Manufacturing companies established in 1980 Manufacturing companies disestablished in 2008 Technology companies based in San Diego Technology companies established in 1980 Technology companies disestablished in 2008