Reality Check On New Tape Format - DLT tape drives - Buyers Guide

Computer Technology Review, Sept, 1999 by Mark Brownstein

Throughout the year, CTR has been reporting on what we've called the "Tape Wars." In essence, our coverage has explored the ongoing efforts by tape hardware developers to unseat, or at least chip into, the dominant place that Quantum's DLT drives have earned in the Enterprise.

Polaroid, which owned the `instant' camera business in the 1960s and much of the 1970s, was smart enough to realize that its major competitor was itself--although it had the patent on the basic technology enabling its products, the company continued to push for newer, better products that leveraged the technology. Similarly, Quantum has been pushing to keep up with, or jump ahead of, competing technologies that promise competitive performance and reliability specifications. Like Polaroid, which developed a color version of its photographic technology because color photography was becoming the dominant competing technology, Quantum has similarly been making ongoing changes in order to meet the ever increasing market demands for higher capacity, higher performance, and lower per-megabyte storage costs. In this article, a few of the most recent DLT challengers, including DLT itself, will be explored.

New 8mm Offerings

During 1999, most of the 8mm contenders announced last year have actually begun shipping. Sony's AIT-2, for example, began shipping mid-year and is available from Sony and a number of its OEM customers.

AIT-2 boasts native capacities of 50GB per tape and a 6MB/sec native transfer rate. With compression, both capacity and performance can be expected to run at approximately 2:1, depending upon the type of data being recorded onto the tape. In addition, the AIT-2 cartridge uses memory-in-chip technology that enables directory information and usage statistics to be recorded onto the cartridge. This feature enables automation devices to read information about the cartridge without having to load it into the drive.

Exabyte's long delayed Mammoth-2 drives are expected to begin shipping sometime in November, according to reports from the company. Mammoth-2 will reportedly have a native capacity of 60GB and native transfer rate of 12MB/sec. Again, with compression, capacity and performance may double.

Exabyte has recently trimmed back its work force and has offered a free upgrade program for some of its tape library systems. Current purchasers of specific systems that use Mammoth drives will be eligible for a free upgrade to Mammoth-2 drives once they become available. Additionally, Exabyte appears to be repositioning itself as a SAN integrator through its NetStorm initiative. NetStorm is designed to sell SAN backup systems that use Exabyte's tape libraries and to provide complete systems on which the somewhat intimidating SAN configurations have already been tested and proven. It also, obviously, is designed to help boost Exabyte's sales of automated tape libraries.

Exabyte recently announced price reduction on its low-end Mammoth drive, the Mammoth-LT. This drive, with a price of under $1000, offers 14GB native capacity and a native transfer rate of 2MB/sec. At its current pricing, the Mammoth-LT is clearly positioned to compete with such lower-end devices as DDS-3 and 20GB Travan drives. Additionally, any capturing of market share away from DDS and Travan can only help boost the financial performance of the company.

A potentially strong challenger to DLT, in addition to its 8mm helical scan cousins, is the Ecrix VXA-l drive. The VXA-1's 3MB/sec native transfer rate puts it more into a league to compete with current generation Mammoth, NIT-1 and DDS 3 drives than with Mammoth-2, AIT-2, or DLT7000, DLT8000, SDLT, or LTO drives. Native capacities of 12GB and 33GB per cartridge also position it roughly in line with Mammoth, AIT-1, and DLT7000.

Perhaps the strongest selling points that Ecrix has made for its technologies are reliability and price. With a suggested price of $1165, the Ecrix drive is priced competitively to DDS-3 and slightly above Exabyte's Mammoth-LT. However, native capacity and performance suggest clear superiority over DDS-3 and DLT4000, and much lower cost-per-megabyte than DLT7000 or Mammoth drives.

Even more important than price/performance may be the claimed robustness of cartridges and drives using Ecrix technology. Unlike other recording technologies that record large frames or blocks of data, Ecrix records data in 64-byte packets. Because the packets are so small, write errors can be easily detected and corrected on the fly, virtually guaranteeing 100% data accuracy, according to the company. Further, Ecrix's read technology uses four heads to read the data. Each packet can be read more than once by one or more heads as the tape moves past the head. Electronics inside the drive reassemble the packets into a continuous data stream.

Ecrix has demonstrated the ability of its drives to read tapes written in other Ecrix drives. Additionally, Ecrix has demonstrated the ability of its drives to read cartridges that have been subjected to such torture tests as freezing, dropping, and even dropping into hot coffee. The ability of the Ecrix drives to read cartridges that have been subjected to hazards that may make cartridges used by other tape formats unreadable may help this company earn market share in the midrange storage market.