-M2 was late and took 5 months to get through launch problems but still is way ahead of the competition
You know that. I know that. Unfortunately, IBM, HWP, SEG and Fujitsu have succeeded in winning mindshare. Accelis, Ultrium, Multiple-sourcing, clean-sheet open standards, broad cross-licensing, visible upgrade path. Those are the high notes that have assured LTO serious consideration for this current post-Y2K corporate upgrade cycle. DLT and Mammoth are single-sourced drives so even their substantial installed base will probably take a good hard look at LTO because of those features.
Have you seen any easy high performance tape births and launches?
Helical scan drives are more complex and as the Exabyte experience clearly shows, the first stage of a typical 3-4 stage format cycle can be murder. Linear drives, like DLT and LTO, tend to have gentler cycles because of the simple mechanics involved. As you know, it uses the same mechanics as the early wire recorders that started coming more than a 100 years ago. As some of us noted a few years ago when Quantum first laid out the specs for the next-generation DLT, they may have tried to cram too many new features at the same time.
Moreover, vendor incompatibilities may be a minor consideration with LTO because of the way LTO -- the ultimate datatape drive, really -- was conceived by a limited number of players with genuine market clout such that there is no percentage for anybody to deviate from the technical parameters. If you think about it, the competition in the tape business is more logistical and marketing in nature because the drives go into libraries that are typically sold with in-house service contracts at the high-end and private-label service contracts (outsourcer) at the low-end and the middle market.
One other thing is the datapoints provided by EMC that the Global 2000 are doubling their storage requirements every year while the dotcoms are doubling their storage requirements every 90 days. One would expect that there would be a direct correlation between the growth in disk arrays and the complementary backup libraries. That is why I think the action has shifted from the drives to the libraries.
If the valuations are not yet reflecting realities such as those then for sure, the LTO crowd will make try mightily to make it so especially when they have real working drives to use instead of press releases and white papers. |
