US storage vendor Exabyte Corp wants to regain market share among mid-size IT installations (6-16 servers) from Quantum Corp with its Mammoth-2 tape drives and libraries. Exabyte’s Mammoth technology lost market leadership to Quantum’s DLT in the mid-nineties, but the Boulder, Colorado-based company thinks the advances incorporated into the second generation of the product line should improve its performance.

The reason for this is two-fold. While Quantum is offering DLT8000 as the next step up from the 7000 series, Exabyte argues that Mammoth-2 represents a greater capacity and transfer rate increase for a street price likely to be identical, i.e. $4,100 per drive.

Mammoth-2 has a native capacity of 60 Gigabytes and, thanks to a change in compression technology from the IRDC algorithm to IBM’s adaptive lossless data compression (ALDC) chipset, it rises to 150GB compressed, rather than merely doubling. This compares to 20GB native and 40GB compressed for Mammoth-1, 35GB native and 70GB compressed for DLT7000, and 50GB native and 100GB compressed on the third player in this market segment, AIT-2 drives from Sony Corp.

On the speed issue, Mammoth-2 transfers data at 12 Megabytes per second native and 30MBps compressed, up from 3MBps native and 6MBps compressed on Mammoth-1, 5MBps native and 10MBps compressed for DLT7000 and 6MBps and 12MBps compressed for AIT-2.

On the other hand Quantum’ still more advanced offering, SuperDLT, will only be launched next year and will, at least for the first few months, not be backward compatible with existing DLT drives. Thus users of DLT7000 who are currently reaching the limit of that drive’s capacity are faced with a choice of the 8000, which increases only 5GB in native capacity and 1MBps in transfer rate, or waiting for SuperDLT, only to face the initial backward compatibility issue. As such, argued Ken Cruden, Exabyte’s director of drive marketing and its storage media business, the technology switch to Mammoth-2 should not look so daunting for these customers.

Exabyte reckons to have around 20%-25% of the target market already using its earlier storage products, namely Mammoth-1 or the earlier lines. For them, therefore, it will be offering a backward compatible upgrade. Between its present customer base and those users it can entice away from DLT (about 60% of the market) and AIT (5%-10%), Cruden says the company’s initial goal is to achieve a 30%-35% share of the market next year. To reinforce its assault on the market, Exabyte is currently seeking to woo OEMs to sign up for either Mammoth-2 media or drives in order to build drives or libraries.

Cruden said Exabyte does not see the LTO tape format being championed by IBM, HP and Seagate as a competitor to Mammoth-2, putting it in a higher-end category that will sell to major corporates rather than medium-sized companies or branch offices. Indeed, he went on, the company has recently signed an OEM deal to buy drives, add its automation expertise and sell LTO libraries (CI No 3,759). This represents a break from Exabyte’s previous high-end strategy, which was to accompany each upward step in DLTtape capacity, the latest product of which was its 230D library of DLT7000 drives.

We want to compete with HP and other LTO library vendors for OEM business from companies that decide to switch from DLT to LTO, Cruden explained, adding that he did not expect Exabyte to OEM with DLT8000 devices. We will, however, probably automate SuperDLT drives, he went on.