"Ultrium" Tape Products Ready To Roll
By Mark Hachman, TechWeb News
Aug 21, 2000 (11:20 AM)
URL: techweb.com
Products supporting the Linear Tape Open specification are nearly ready to roll, promising to lower costs across all of the tape market, analysts say. For several years, Quantum Corp.'s Digital Linear Tape specification has dominated the market for archival linear tape solutions. While Quantum (stock: DSS) has raked in revenues from sales of DLT drives, media, and licensing fees, a trio of manufacturers -- Hewlett-Packard Co. (stock: HP), IBM (stock: IBM), and Seagate Technology Inc. (stock: SEG)-- have worked since April 1998 to develop their own, "open," rival standard, LTO.
"It's great news for the tape industry," said Brenda Zawatski, vice-president of removable media solutions at IBM's Storage Systems Division, San Jose. "Before when you bought a DLT drive or a drive from IBM, you were kind of locked in."
On Monday, IBM will announce its plans for the LTO specification, the first generation of which has now been branded by the three manufacturers as "Ultrium." Ultrium will compete with the established DLT standard from Quantum and its licensees, which have sold more than 1.4 million DLTtape drives and over 45 million DLTtape cartridges to date and are eyeing a next-generation standard, Super DLT.
While IBM offered a comprehensive plan to roll out individual Ultrium drives and tape libraries, Seagate also claimed that it would ship a competitive product before the end of the quarter. A spokeswoman for Hewlett-Packard also said HP was finalizing an announcement for as early as next week, but declined to offer further details. Executives at Fujitsu Ltd., which has also licensed LTO, were unavailable for comment at press time.
Analysts say that the specification should lower prices across the tape industry. "You're going to have multiple suppliers, and when I say that, I also mean more than one source of R&D," said Fara Yale, tape analyst at GartnerGroup/Dataquest, San Jose, speaking of the competition between HP, IBM, and Seagate. "It's going to pit one vendor against another. That's going to drive prices down, and eventually that's going to cascade into DLT media."
Both the LTO and DLT camps are primarily targeting B-to-B portals, Fortune 500 companies, and individuals who want absolute reliability from their backup systems, used to archive their most vital data.
On September 1, IBM will offer a $9,250 desktop Ultrium SCSI drive for small-office use, and a high-end Ultrium library, scaling from one to two frames, or storage chasses.
The "Anaconda" or IBM 3584 library can contain up to 24 LTO drives and 721 tape cartridges using two frames. A feature called "multipath server attach" allows the Anaconda library to connect up to 72 servers at once. The total storage capacity is up to 72 terabytes, for a minimum of $42,000 up to about $75,000, depending on the configuration. The additional expansion frame is $30,000 extra.
A seven-cartridge IBM 3581 autoloader for departmental servers and a smaller scalable library family, the IBM 7583, will be available on October 20, according to the company. While the 7583 allows up to six LTO drives, the price varies according to the number of cartridges; prices range from over $20,000 to just over $37,000, depending on whether a buyer wants 18, 36, or 72 cartridges. Support for the AS/400 server and compatibility with the LTO drives will be added on November 17.
IBM has also developed solutions tailored for individual market segments, as well as configurations designed for NAS and SAN configurations.
HP tape executives in Bristol, England, were unavailable for comment, although a spokeswoman in the U.S said the company was preparing an announcement for release asearly as this week. Brad Renfree, a senior product marketing manager at Seagate, Scotts Valley, Calif., said, "Seagate will ship Ultrium products this month. Actually, I think all Ultrium manufacturers will be within a couple of weeks of each other."
The first-generation LTO specification calls for 100-Gbytes of uncompressed storage, and data transfer rates of between 10 and 20 Mbytes/s, using metal particle media. Quantum's high-end DLT6000 drives, meanwhile, contain 40 Gbytes of uncompressed data, transferred at speeds of 6 Mbytes/s.
The linear-scan method used by both DLT and LTO uses stationary read and write heads, and a less complex "serpentine" tape writing method that theoretically gives both tape technologies superior reliability than so-called "helical" scan technologies. Helical scan is used by Sony's Advanced Intelligent Tape (AIT), Digital Audio Tape (DAT) and VCR cassettes, which slightly incline the read/write head.
That puts more wear and tear on helical-scan cartridges, some say. According to a January study performed by James Nall, tape product marketing manager at Dell Computer Corp., Round Rock, Texas, DAT drives typically offer about one half as many "tape motion hours" as the more expensive DLT drives, meaning the tapes will last longer. Dell sells both DAT and DLT-based archival systems.
The paranoia about losing data has led DLT to become a popular solution for data archiving, and it's a market IBM and the LTO camp hope to cut into. To further ensure reliability, and to separate the company's offerings from its competitors, IBM has developed a method called Statistical Automated Reporting. Using an SRAM chip embedded into each cartridge, the drive stores exactly which data tracks have been corrupted. In this way, a customer can tell how badly the tape has worn, and assess whether or not he wants to use the cartridge again.
"Typically, in talking to customers, you use a DLT tape cartridge three times and throw it out," Zawatski said. "I've even spoken to one customer who said, 'Three times? I throw it out after one.'"
Quantum's answer to LTO will be products based on a Quantum-designed specification called Super DLT, the first generation of which will not be backwards-compatible with DLT. Capacities will range from 80 to 110 Gbytes, while data transfer rates will begin at 8 Mbytes/s and work up to 16 Mbytes/s. Backwards-compatibility with the current generation of DLT products will be added in products shipping later in the year, Quantum executives said.
"We're still on track for our own [product] announcement and shipment by the end of the quarter," said William Boles, vice-president of group for the DLT Tape Group at Quantum, Milpitas, Calif. "We had always targeted the summertime, which means up until the end of the third quarter."
Right now, it's too close of a race to call, analysts said. "DLT has a big installed base...but LTO has a time-to-market advantage," Dataquest's Yale said.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Emerging Tape Backup Market
Dave Fetters
July 24, 2000, Issue: 1114
Section: Workshop -- Servers & Peripherals
techweb.com
Jim |
