History 2001: Are Tape Drives Still Necessary?

Are tape drives still necessary?

We obtained the following response to this question from Robin Burke, one of Dataquest/Gartner’s primary analysts, who was present at this year’s Stockage 2001 expo in Paris, on September 26: “The role of tape drives is changing at the enterprise, but tape will survive for the foreseeable future. New applications, such as email backup, digital asset management applications and storing medical images or other images, present new opportunities. In the more traditional role, tape will have to adjust to a co-dependent role with disk drive replication for fast mission critical restores and tape automation for archival and DR.”

Burke did not fail to note a dramatic decline in the total European tape drive market:
• 1.1 million drives were shipped in 2000, vs. 1.3 million in 1999, a 17.9% decrease;
• factory revenues declined by more than $45 million, down to a mere $1 billion, a 4.3% decrease;
• end-user revenues did grow in Europe, but only by $66 million, to $1.7 billion, a 3.9% increase. He projects $2.0 billion for 2005.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 165 on October 2001 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.