Some stories, FWIW.
--Duker
crn.com
WebTV drops hard disk for flash device
By By Mark Hachman, Electronic Buyers' News San Mateo, Calif.
10:12 AM EST Fri., June 04, 1999
WebTV Networks Inc. has pulled a Seagate 1-Gbyte hard drive from its WebTV set-top boxes in favor of an 8-Mbyte flash card from M-Systems Flash Disk Pioneers Ltd.
A number of WebTV subscribers complained that the hard drive created a distraction, said a spokesman for the Mountain View, Calif., company. "Initially, subscribers were really excited about having a hard drive in there. But it wasn't really that great for a television environment. It was kind of loud."
Instead, the WebTV Plus box will use an 8-Mbyte flash card from Newark, Calif.-based M-Systems for local storage. While analysts have been skeptical about the ability of such a low-capacity card to handle storage functions, the WebTV spokesman said the company had developed sophisticated methods of storing content within its own network, caching the data on its own servers. "We found we didn't need [the hard drive]," he said.
WebTV's WebTV Classic set-top boxes never employed a hard drive. Seagate Technology Inc.'s low-cost, 8.1-Gbyte U4 hard drive is still included in the DISHPlayer set-top boxes co-designed by WebTV and EchoStar Communications Corp. and manufactured by EchoStar, the WebTV spokesman said..
A wholesale abandonment of hard drives in set-top boxes is unlikely, according to industry analysts. "I firmly believe that next-generation set-top boxes will have a hard drive in there as a primary storage device," said John Monroe, an analyst at Dataquest Inc., San Jose.
Monroe said sales of hard drives for non-PC devices, including set-top boxes, were only about 1 million units in 1998, but will grow to 1.2 million units in 1999 and about 20 million in 2002.
crn.com
Drive Makers On Track For Adoption Of LTO Technology
By Joseph F. Kovar Las Vegas
8:50 AM EST Fri., May 21, 1999
Will LTO Fly Off With SDLT's Market?
Tape-drive and media vendors said at the recent Networld Interop Show, held here, that they are on track to release products using Linear Tape-Open (LTO) technology.
LTO specifications were co-developed by Hewlett-Packard Co., Palo Alto, Calif.; IBM Corp., Armonk, N.Y.; and Seagate Technology Inc., Scotts Valley, Calif., and are licensed to drive and media manufacturers. The companies said they developed the formats to serve multiple market areas and to be supported by multiple suppliers.
LTO technology is used in two different tape-drive formats, Ultrium and Accessis. Most of the development going on so far has focused on the Ultrium format, vendors said.
The Ultrium format uses a single-reel cartridge with native capacity of up to 100 Gbytes and native data-transfer rates of up to 40 Mbytes per second (MBps).
Executives at the three co-developers of the technology said Measurement Analysis Corp. (MAC), Torrance, Calif., was chosen to perform technical testing and analysis of LTO drives and media to ensure compatibility between products from multiple vendors.
Also last week, Fuji Photo Film Co. Ltd., Tokyo, became the fifth tape-cartridge vendor to license the Ultrium format.
IBM recently demonstrated that it could store 100 Gbytes of data on an Ultrium tape cartridge for the first time, said Steve Berens, director of marketing for OEM tape products at IBM.
The vendor expects to start shipping Ultrium drives this year, Berens said.
HP will ship beta units of its Ultrium drives in early 2000, followed by general availability to the channel in the second half of 2000, said Rick Boss, Ultrium product manager for the company.
While HP will remain committed to the DLT tape technology as a platform for its autoloaders and tape libraries, the company also will develop similar automation products based on the Ultrium format, Boss said.
Meanwhile, Super DLTtape drives and media already are being beta-tested, and limited production is expected late this year, said executives at Quantum Corp., Milpitas, Calif.
Storage capacity of Super DLTtape is expected to start at 100 Gbytes per cartridge, with transfer rates starting at about 10 MBps, with compression.
crn.com
Will LTO Fly Off With SDLT's Market?
Vendors dig into the storage nest with two new technologies
By Jan Stafford
1:22 PM EST Fri., May 07, 1999
Backers of two new tape drive technologies are battling for dominance in a market that, until now, has exceeded tape's grasp. Even though products won't be shipped until late this year or early 2000, manufacturers are actively campaigning for mind share in the high-end server backup market.
There's good news for VARs: Both technologies--Linear Tape-Open (LTO) and Super Digital Linear Tape (SDLT)--have the capacity and performance to kick tape upstream into enterprise environments, where tape hasn't played before. The bad news: There are now two more tape technologies to add to the mind-numbing tape smorgasbord.
"There are so many drive technologies, and each has its strengths," says Jim Diehl, account manager for R&D Industries Inc., a VAR in Bellevue, Wash. "It takes constant research to keep up."
Drawing Battle Lines
The LTO vs. SDLT battle looks like a David and Goliath match-up. There's a powerful triumvirate behind LTO: Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM Corp. and Seagate Technology Inc. Meanwhile, Quantum Corp. is the primary developer of SDLT products. Evening the odds for Quantum, however, is the success of SDLT's precursor, DLT. Quantum, in fact, shipped its millionth DLT drive last month.
LTO technology promises to maximize tape drive capacity, performance and reliability by combining linear multichannel, bidirectional formats with enhancements in servo technology (provides precise starts and stops), data compression, track layout and error-correction code.
LTO will come in two flavors: Ultrium and Accelis. Ultrium, which will be first to market, is a high-capacity, single-reel implementation that offers up to 100 GB of capacity (200 GB with 2:1 compression) and 20-MBps to 40-MBps data transfer rates. The LTO road map puts Ultrium's capacity at 800 GB in its fourth generation. Accelis drives will offer fast-access, dual-reel, 25-GB (50-GB compressed) capacity and data retrieval in less than 10 seconds.
Meanwhile, DLT drives use linear recording technology and a highly accurate tape guide system to offer capacities ranging from 15 GB to 35 GB and transfer rates of 1.25 MBps to 5 MBps. SDLT drives, which should hit the VAR market in early 2000, will scale from a minimum of 100 GB to more than 1 TB in capacity in future generations. They also will offer 10 MBps to more than 100 MBps in data transfer rates over multiple product generations.
Storage Karma
Format battles are nothing new in the tape drive business. "Just as Quantum usurped Exabyte's position with high capacity and high performance for server backup, the LTO consortium wants to do the same to Quantum," says Mike Befeler, vice president of marketing and business development for Benchmark Tape Systems Corp., which designs storage solutions for leading vendors.
Right off the bat, the LTO consortium hit on DLT's most obvious weakness: It's a proprietary technology. Quantum was the sole manufacturer of DLT until recently licensing the technology to Tandberg Data ASA. LTO, on the other hand, promises to be an open-tape architecture available for license to all manufacturers. In addition to the three LTO founders, Fujitsu Computer Products of America's tape division will make LTO drives, and several vendors will manufacture media.
"Rarely, if ever, has a new format shown up with such a broad industry endorsement," says Kevin Perry, Seagate removable storage senior director of marketing and business development. "Customers can adopt this format without worrying about owning a technology controlled by a single company."
Seeing Green
DLT's success has the LTO faction "green with envy," one industry insider says. A number of companies, including HP, do include Quantum/Tandberg Data DLT drives in their storage products. Naturally, says one analyst, HP would love to have all that tape drive revenue for itself. Meanwhile, Seagate and IBM both need a good tape vehicle to move up-market. Indeed, analysts report that Seagate's tape drive business has not been stellar.
LTO's weakness is incompatibility with existing drives. "LTO has multiple formats and none seem to be compatible with anything that exists today in the marketplace," says John Woelbern, senior marketing manager for Sony Electronics Inc.'s Tape Streamer products.
SDLT, Quantum says, will offer backward compatibility to more than 1 million drives and 30 million DLT tape cartridges.
"This means a smooth upgrade path for drive customers," says William Boles, vice president of marketing for Quantum's DLTtape division. "Also, compatibility with DLT tape means that today's archived data will be retrievable on tomorrow's tape drives."
Incompatibility with existing drives isn't a big concern, LTO proponents counter. Businesses can continue to use existing drives to read legacy tapes.
"Rather than tie our hands to being compatible, we've taken the best of what's available in the market and implemented it in a unique way," says Gillian Garrahy, HP's LTO product marketing manager.
Yet, LTO isn't all that unique, according to the opposition. The first generation of Ultrium is using "an older read channel technology that was actually used in some of Quantum's older DLT tape products," says Quantum's Boles. "Apparently, LTO is going to change that encoding scheme" in other versions, which will inconvenience customers. First and second generations of SDLT, however, will use partial-response maximum likelihood encoding technology.
"That means there will be no major redesigns and, therefore, no major customer requalifications in getting to that second generation," says Boles.
LTO proponents believe SDLT will not handle the speed and capacity Quantum maps out for it. "The DLT design is being maxed out," says Mark Eastman, product manager at Fujitsu Computer Products.
"Taking it to LTO's level isn't possible."
Disagreeing, Boles says: "We have a growth path with a proven technology that has established reliability. LTO doesn't."
Vendors Take Note
Watching from the sidelines of this battle, some vendors are mapping strategies that take advantage of the LTO vs. SDLT war. For example, Sony's AIT autoloader is being positioned as a midrange complement to SDLT and LTO, and as a migration option for Sony's DDS, Mammoth and low-end DLT drives, according to Woelbern. Benchmark, says Befeler, will attack with a midrange derivative of DLT priced to compete with DDS.
Both LTO and SDLT have strengths that will make them market forces.
"The backing of multiple manufacturers will give LTO some competitive strengths," says Fara Yale, an analyst for Dataquest Inc., a market researcher in San Jose. These include product differentiation, price competitiveness, R&D funding and lack of availability worries. On the other hand, she says, SDLT has the advantage of a large installed base, momentum in the market and a clearer migration path.
In the short run, at least, VARs will need to know enough about both to make a choice. |
