New Enterprise Tape Library OEM Agreement for Quantum With HP

Quantum Corp. announced a new OEM agreement with HP under which HP will brand and sell a new enterprise tape library based on Quantum’s Scalar i6000 platform.

The agreement builds on the strong partnership the two companies have established in tape-based storage, including a previous OEM relationship in enterprise tape automation.

With the changing role of tape in long-term archive and data retention, Quantum’s Scalar i6000 tape library is built to address customers’ needs in demanding enterprise storage environments.

Highlights of the Scalar i6000 include:

Lowers administrative management time and operating costs and provides data integrity verification for archived tapes with innovative iLayer software technology;
Scales to support up to 16 petabytes of data to meet high data growth needs;
Protects against data breaches with advanced security features such as AES 256-bit encryption, host access control and, later this year, key manager interoperability protocol (KMIP) 1.0 support; and
Provides high availability features, such as redundant data and control paths, redundant power, and dual robotics to be added in the second half of this year.

Rob Clark, senior vice president, Disk and Tape Backup Product Group, Quantum, said: "HP’s selection of Quantum’s Scalar i6000 tape library as their next-generation tape platform validates our product strategy as well as confirms the extended value that tape provides for enterprises. This agreement also expands our partnership with HP and extends the benefits of our leading tape automation portfolio to more customers."

Comments

Overland was a main OEM of HP for tape libraries but progressively lost this huge customer to concentrate on branded products. Now it's mainly Quantum.

On the other side, HP is an OEM of Quantum for LTO and DDS/DAT tape drives even this information was never officially revealed.

High-end libraries continue to be relatively successful for a precise application: when you need a lot of archiving capacities. The price of a tape cartridge being lower than a disk drive, total cost of ownership is finally more interesting with a small number of tape drives even if they are much more expansive than HDDs.

For lower-end tape autoloaders, German manufacturer BDT is the principal furnisher of about all companies but IBM, working also with NEC. But this market is decreasing, being eaten by D2D backup subsystems.