History (1998): Tandberg Data Second Source of Quantum DLT Drives

It took a while, but now it’s a done deal: Tandberg Data has signed a manufacture license and marketing agreement with Quantum to be a second-source for DLT drives, including those products still in development such as the Super-DLT.

It plans to begin marketing DLT products, including media and libraries, before the end of the year. Full operation of the drive manufacturing is expected within a year.

Discussions between the 2 parties began over a year ago, without result. Was Quantum being a little too greedy? The announcement of LTO technology apparently got the ball rolling again.

“We needed to position ourselves with respect to LTO,” confirmed Arnaud Servole, GM, Tandberg Data France.

Apparently, the argument also pushed Quantum into action. In the end, Tandberg has opted for DLT, which can now count on 2 major supporters, while the opposing camp includes all the main tape drive makers, apart from Exabyte, Overland Data, Sony, STK and Tecmar (see chart below).

DLT library manufacturers and current PC OEMs that integrate DLT drives, such as Dell, IBM, Sun, StoraTek, Hewlett-Packard and Compaq must have been happy to learn of this agreement.

“Quantum is demonstrating their industry leadership by providing multi-vendor ability of this industry-standard storage system. […] We applauded this move as storage systems for protecting enterprise data become increasingly more important to our customers,” said Kirby Wadsworth, Compaq’s VP of storage marketing.

“We will focus our distribution on distributors and small OEMs, rather than on major strategic international accounts,” explained Servole.

Will this agreement engender real competition between the 2 manufacturers, leading to Iower prices for costly DLT drives? Impossible to say yet, until the precise details of the agreement are disclosed.

Tandberg’s reputation as a quality streamer manufacturer is indisputable, a factor Quantum clearly took into account. The latter firm has always preferred its own business model, which consists of sub-contracting all production of the HDDs it designs and markets. Until now, all of its experiments with manufacturing products (disk drives, heads) have been inconclusive.

At times, Quantum has even had difficulty in manufacturing sufficient quantities of its tape drives. Now Tandberg will be able to come to the rescue of customers.

According to the terms of this agreement, Quantum has the option to negotiate a license to manufacture Tandberg SLR drives. If Tandberg is now a second-source manufacturer for DLT technology, it has its own second-source manufacturer for SLR technology, Overland (and who knows, perhaps Quantum in the future).

“And we could always license LTO,” adds Servole.

Tandberg Quantum