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Technology Stocks : DSS: DLT finally open for trading -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Robert Douglas who wrote (258)	4/27/2000 8:20:00 PM
From: Sam	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 488

Rob, Really, I am a little mystified as to why the tape business isn't experiencing more growth with the overall growth of storage. Perhaps the problem is that DLT aims at the mid-range market, and it is the low end and the high end that are growing faster. I'm not really sure. But STK, which sells high end drives, certainly isn't setting the world on fire, in fact quite the opposite. But perhaps high end people use redundant disks to back themselves up, and deem tape to be unnecessary? That seems a little far-fetched to me, as tape is minimally better for long term storage, though disks have the advantage of being random access and thus retrieval is faster. The cost of disk storage has become so low, though, that perhaps some are doing it. So this is a very long way of saying I don't really know. Last quarter, Michael Brown said that mid-range server growth rate was 5%, and used that number (from IDC) to explain the shortfall in DLT revenue. But this quarter, we didn't hear that kind of projection, and sales of DLT8000 doubled from last, so to some extent it may have been due a longer qualification cycle than he expected and perhaps some Y2K hesitation to buy robust new equipment. On the DD thread, I posted an article on EMC that suggested (again the original source was IDC) that servers were becoming obsolete, that storage systems of one sort or another were going to replace them. Perhaps. But even these need backup. Brown suggested that SDLT was going to come in different flavors, it would be a family of products, and seemed to suggest that perhaps SDLT might even be ready to jump to a higher capacity than they previously indicated (or perhaps that was wishful thinking on my part, I don't know). If so, that would be a good thing, since we will soon be jumping from measuring very large storage needs in terabytes to pedabytes, as unimaginable as that was just a year ago to me. Not sure that this babbling is of any help. But there it is. Making a fool of myself again. Best wishes, Sam