Hal,
Last year, NT sold about the same number of boxes as UNIX. A milestone of sorts except that, in terms of revenues, UNIX boxes generated over $12 Billion in revenues while NT only generated under $3.0 billion in revenues. This means that Intel and Microsoft are grabbing market share in the low-end UNIX segments, but UNIX boxes are still the platform of choice for large and medium sized corporate sites.
Will NT eventually replace UNIX? I don't know. Intel's 64 bit Merced, which it is developing with HWP, is going to have the capability of running 64 bit Windows NT AND 64 bit Unix, which HWP is developing with SCO (Santa Clara Org.). The last I heard MERCED is now slated for a 1999 roll out.
Regardless of which platform prevails, it is good to see Ampex developing close ties with Legato which is committed to supporting both Unix AND Windows NT. Incidentally, Legato's Networker (UNIX version) is going to be the core of Sun Microsystem's Solstice Backup software which Sun intends to package with its open storage solutions targeted initially at the $6.0 billion UNIX-Solaris storage market. Apparently, Sun, which owns something like 30-40% of the UNIX market, got tired of seeing the likes of EMC, Storagetek, and Quantum making so much money by providing storage solutions to their Solaris boxes that they decided to get into the business themselves.
I think it is important to remember that the bigger the disk drives, the bigger the RAID arrays. The bigger the RAID arrays, the larger the back-up requirements. The larger the back-up requirements, the larger the market for unique products like DST which offer superior speed and capacity. Sun, for example, expects that in 3 years, the large corporate database will average between 5-10 Terabytes. That kind of database is probably 7x24x365, which means that the backup windows are going to be small, which means that backup devices have to be extremely fast. By then the DST tape drive will be capable of speeds up to 40 MB/sec with a fiber channel interface, and with cartridges ranging from 250 GB to 750 GB to 1.65 Terabytes. Contrast that with DLT which Quantum expects to bring to12 MB/sec and 100 GB cartridge capacity by the end of this decade.
DST is targeted at the high-end segment while DLT is targeted at the mid-range segment so they don't exactly compete. DLT is a certified billion dollar marketing success for Quantum, but it is based on the oldest recording format around. The limitations are fairly well known. In order to increase capacity and speed you have to design more heads (currently 4 heads or channels to reach 5 MB/sec), lay out more tracks (narrower heads), increase bit density (reducing inductance and the physical gap between the head poles), AND potentially the most difficult problem of all, increasing the tape speed from the current 150 inches per second. Increasing the tape speed causes so many problems like reliability and head/media wear and tear that in the fifties, the rotary head (transverse/helical scan) was invented by you know who. The rotary head recorder moves the tape slowly (up to 6 inches per second) because it is the fast rotating scanner, up to speeds of 6,000 revolutions per minute, or 100 revolutions per second, that lays down the tracks on the tape.
A good example is the press releases emananting from Microsoft's Scalability Day. In order to achieve a throughput of 180 GB/hour, Storagetek has to use 10 DLT7000 drives. Ampex only has to use 4 DST drives. The fewer the drives, the lower the CPU overhead. The fewer the cartridges, the simpler the robotics. The simpler the robotics, the higher the reliability. The bonus is that you can buy any DST library now and get an upgrade path to quad-density next year and 10x density the year after that.
With Merced expected to increasing processing power 3-5x and with bandwidth on the network increasing dramatically, I think we are going to see some really interesting growth in the 19mm storage business over the next few years, especially if Ampex continues to lower the prices of its best-of-breed drives as they sell more drives. Remember that one of the goals of the major restructuring program was to lower the manufacturing break-even point. Once that break-even point is achieved, an increasingly larger portion of the sales price of each unit drops straight to the bottomline, which incidentally is going to be tax-free for the next $95 million or so.
Gus |
