History (1993): Gigatrend Stops Manufacturing DAT Devices

“We will no longer keep on the technology race, because the investment in the DDS-2 would be too expensive. We are finishing with JVC’s mechanisms, then we will probably distribute Hewlett-Packard’s drive,” said Michel Grosbost, GM of worldwide marketing and sales of Gigatrend (Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France).

Like it often happens in the storage industry, the first ones are not the last ones.

Gigatrend changed name on January 1, 1993. It was the continuation of Gigatape Systeme für Datensicherungen GmbH (Puchheim, Germany), founded in May 1987, by Peter Rosenbeck, Wolfgang Seidelmann, Harald Sonntag and Hans Joachim Steinmetz with the sole objective to develop, produce and market a streamer based on the digital audio tape technology.

The company showed its first product, the Giga 1200, with a 1.2GB capacity, at the German show Systems and then, in March 1988, at the Hanover Fair.

It was the first 4mm DAT drive ever seen (Mitsumi and Hitachi came shortly afterwards).

At this time, the firm was planning to manufacture 20,000 drives the same year and 240,000 in 1990. Today, according to Grosbot, no more than 18,000 have been sold in Europe and in the US. A lack of financial means, an image too European, an important delay in bringing out its final product, then the arrival of big competitors like Hewlett-Packard and Sony, merging to establish a recording format (the DDS) that Gigatape took too long to adopt, are among the reasons of Gigatape’s failure today in manufacturing DAT units.

“There will probably be only two DAT manufacturers left, Hewlett-Packard and Conner Peripherals,” added Grosbot.

In April 1992, most of the company is bought over by Digital Peripherals Corp. of Taiwan.

Since the beginning of July, Gigatrend has a new CEO, Tom Parkinson, well known in the storage industry as he was an executive for Wangtek and Rexon. Peter Fei, from DPC, was Gigatrend’s former CEO.

This doesn’t mean that Gigatrend is stopping all its activities. It will now focus on the selling of independent hardware solutions, bought from outside, but still based on magnetic tapes, DAT or OIC, from 250MB to 92GB, especially for the time being with products originated from Sanyo Seiki, Exabyte or ADIC, or software from Cheyenne, with the idea of offering a HSM type subsystem that could also include Winchester or RAID disks.

Gigatrend had already enlarged its range of value-added products like MasterSafe, a backup solution for Novell networks. The license of the product has recently been sold to Conner, with an agreement offering the possibility of acquiring storage units from Conner at the best price. Gigatrend’s last development is named Lisa, a card manufactured in Germany that can automatically duplicate on several backup units in a mirror mode.

This article is an abstract of news published on the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter on issue 68, published on September 1993.