History (1999): Tape Not Dead

The death of the tape industry has been erroneously predicted on a number of occasions, according to the 1999 Tape Drive Head/Media Market and Technology Report ($775) from Peripheral Research Corp.

Numerous products, including magneto-optical drives, removable disk drives, and the new hybrid magnetic optical drives, have been introduced to take away tape’s crown as the king of backup and archival; but tape has proven itself to be a resilient champion.

Although shipments of tape drives were down in 1998 and will continue to decline in the future, tape drive revenues are growing as demand for the higher priced mid-range and enterprise drives skyrockets.

Contrast this supply-demand equation with the one that currently exists in the disk drive industry where shipment numbers regularly reach record levels at the same time red ink flows from a number of the drive manufacturers’ income statements.

When looking at the overall health of the 2 markets, it is easy to understand why Quantum recently created separate tracking stocks for the HDD and tape drive divisions.

While Quantum’s disk drive division has struggled, the tape business has turned into a profit-making machine. DLT drive shipments topped 400,000 units in 1998 and will continue to grow in 1999, but more importantly, revenue grew to more than $900 million in 1998, and is expected to reach $1.5 billion in the year 2000.

Although DLT has been the big success story in tape over the last few years, it will have to take on a number of new competitors in 1999. This year will see the debuts of Mammoth 2, AIT-2, DDS-4, Ecrix VXA-I, Magstar 3590E, and the LTO drives. Each of these drives will compete with the DLT line in markets ranging from the bottom of the mid-range market on up through the enterprise market.

So what is driving all this activity in the mid-range and enterprise markets? The emergence of NAS and SANs has been a boon to the tape drive industry. Backing up data is now an accepted practice in network as well as enterprise environments. As the value of IT becomes clearer, so does the need to backup this data.

Tape drive manufacturers have adapted to the growing demands of IT professionals by increasing the technological content contained within the drives.

Before becoming the ubiquitous standard in disk drives, MR head technology made its debut in the 3490 tape drives from IBM. MR heads are now becoming common place in numerous tape products replacing the older brass and ferrite heads of previous tape drives. As the use of MR heads has become more predominant, media suppliers have been forced to adapt new technologies such as metal particle tape to increase coercivity levels.

These trends look to continue as new advanced drives such as Mammoth 2, SuperDLT, and the LTO drives hit the market.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 137 on June 1999 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.