Long Live the tape!

Will tape dominate over disk in the nearline storage market, and grow in
importance in the battle for ILM supremacy?

With the explosion of digital data across enterprises, glo-bally, storage has
become one of the intrinsic and salient components of the IT paraphernalia. For
many years, the industry has seen a raging debate on the merits and demerits of
tapes versus disks, as the preferred medium for nearline storage. While only
disk vendors like EMC and NetApps have been clamour-ing about the impending
demise of tapes, vendors like HP, IBM and StorageTek, who deal in both, have
been equivocal that tapes still outscore disks comfortably as the most
convenient form of storage-particularly in the archival and backup domain.

This seemed to be the over-bearing message that came out of the two-day
symposium on storage strategies-organized by HP in the sylvan settings of the
HP Labs at Bristol, in UK. Currently, housing the R&D center and the
post-manufacturing tes-ting labs for the various nearline storage products, the
Bristol Labs is the worldwide headquarter for HP's tape business. This
includes both LTO and DLT; currently, LTO is outselling DLT by nearly three to
four times.

In addition to storage, the HP Labs also performs rese-arch functions on
different futuristic areas like AI, utility computing, grid computing and
nanotechnology, among others. However, the impor-tance of Bristol Labs in HP's
overall storage roadmap can be gauged from the fact that the Nearline Storage
Division contributes nearly 25 percent of the revenues for HP's Sto-rageWorks
Division, as asser-ted David Rogers, Manager-Product Marketing, Tapes, HP UK.

No surprises here since HP's Nearline Storage Division currently offers LTO,
DLT/VS as well as the ubiquitous DDS/DAT, and these anyway con-stitute nearly 95
percent of the total nearline storage market globally. Factory exit reports by
IDC and Gartner point out that DDS/DAT continues to hog the lion's share with
46 percent of the market share in H12004. However, LTO, another form of nearline
storage, based on open standards developed by a consortium of HP, IBM and
Quantum, is catching up fast, already having garnered 16 percent of the market
share. While HP, IBM and Seagate started offering LTO almost at the same time,
and also formed the LTO consortium, Tandberg has now joined this forum as a full
licensee. Plus, Quantum's acquisition of Seagate's LTO business has now
brought the former into the overall gameplan.

While the perennially popular DLT/VS still maintains a 12 percent market
share globally, there seem to be very few takers for proprietary technologies
like Travan and AIT/VXA, which have a mere 10 percent and 8 percent market
share, respectively. In Asia-Pacific, the proportion is even more lop-sided with
LTO taking up 57 percent of the market share followed by DDS/DAT and DLT at 24
percent and 15 percent, respectively. By revenues, Asia-Pacific contributes 19
percent of the global tape market in H12004. Incidentally, within Asia-Pacific,
India seemed to be the leading market with 21 percent market share followed by
Australia, China and Korea at 19 percent, 14 percent and 10 percent
respectively. According to a Purchasing Intentions Survey conducted by
TechTarget, including more than 1000 CIOs globally, in 2004, 79 percent informed
they were likely to either increase or at least maintain their tape storage
spend in 2005.

Ben Wilkinson, who heads HP UK's StorageWorks divi-sion, feels that
economics of cost, reliability as backup media and easy trans-portability
options are the three main parameters where tape scores over disks. He adds a
few more advantages that have emerged in the last 12 months: "Because of
different disasters like 9/11, not only has there been an increase in awareness
about backups, archiving has also become vitally important-particularly of
rich media content. Add to it different compliance requirements like
Sarbannes-Oxley and BASEL II, especially in North America and EMEA, and a
gradual move towards tape automation products."

HP currently leads in both DDS/DAT and LTO domain with 56 percent and 51
percent market share, respectively. Even within Asia-Pacific, HP in H12004
garnered 60 percent of the total $208.45 mn tape market. HP's future roadmap
for nearline storage is also indicative of how important tape-related products
are going to be for the company. With the Gen 3 LTO released just now, HP's
total sale is now around half a million units. With worldwide annual sales of
350,000, the OEM business roughly con-stitutes half of HP's annual LTO sales;
HP has about 400 OEMs in its list.

On the DAT front, HP has sold 7.5 mn standalone drives; the sixth generation
DAT 160 is coming up in 2005 and the eighth generation is planned for 2007. On
the tape side, HP has come out with the concept of One Button Disaster Recovery
(OBDR) and the next generation, Gen 6, is likely in the next 18-24 months. This
unequivocal support for tape drives has prompted HP to further enhance their
port-folio. While in December the Ultrium 960 LTO drive was launched, February
14 saw the official release of the SDLT 320 and the DLT VS 160. The growing
enhancement of its tape related portfolio is also becoming a major weapon for HP
in the ongoing battle for Information Life-cycle Management (ILM) supremacy.
Like every vendor pursuing an ILM strategy, HP had some gaps in its ILM product
line. With these enhancements in its tape line, HP is attempting to address
those gaps.

StorageWorks Data Prote-ctor version 5.5, the com-pany's enterprise data
protection and disaster recovery product, has more than 200 new features.
Objects to disk are now backed up in such a way that they can easily be moved to
tape and restored to disk, allowing organizations to perform backup and restore
simultaneously. Those products and these significant enhancements keep them in
full competition with other ILM vendors like IBM and EMC. HP's recent
tape-related announce-ments may put them tem-porarily ahead of the pack, but the
ILM race continues.

Rajneesh De in
Bristol (The author was hosted by HP)