Tape Drive and Components Markets/Revenue Slide Slightly According to a Peripheral Research Report of October 2001
Business Editors
SANTA BARBARA, Calif.-(BW)-Oct. 8, 2001-Although the Tape Drive markets are suffering along with the rest of the economy, and their demise has been forecasted for years, Tape is one of the stronger components of storage.
The worldwide Tape Drive industry is in a state of transition: the lower performance products such as QIC, Cassette, and Travan products are phasing down, in favor of the DLT, LTO, AIT, and higher performance/capacity products. The industry demands for these higher performance products are smaller, but at $900 to $8,000 the revenue streams are higher per product.
The overall cost of tape storage (Per MB) in an Autoloader, or Library configuration is lower than disk. Although tape may not be the optimum removable storage medium forever, it appears solid for the next 5 - 8 years.
Worldwide Tape drive revenue will decrease over the next few years from approximately $3.9 Billion in 1999 to approximately $3.4 Billion in 2001, then slightly increase to $3.6 billion in 2003. This is mostly due to the transition in technology to more advanced systems, although smaller in numbers, and the mission of tape has changed from the low intelligence unit to an intelligent autoloader, or library sub-system.
The complexity and cost of the critical magnetic heads and magnetic media far exceed that of 10 years ago; advanced half inch tape media has 288 tracks, with an 18, or 36 track parallel head. The SDLT, AIT, and LTO products employ advanced heads and media; and have product roadmaps extending out 3-4 more generations to about 2010 with capacities into the Terabytes; and data rates up to 300 Mbytes per second.
The tape industry markets and the critical components for those products are forecast in the 2001 Tape Drive Head/Media Market and Technology Report available from Peripheral Research Corporation. For information and a copy of the Executive summary contact Peripheral Research Corp. 805/563-9720 |
