Quantum yesterday said it has suspended development of its Super DLT tape drives. Against a background of shrinking tape sales it says that it has also canned the development of its cheaper – and differently formatted – DLT-V drives, and will now concentrate on making tape libraries and disk arrays.
Sony meanwhile admitted that it has not found any third-party library makers interested in offering the next generation S-AIT drives on their products, due to ship soon.
S-AIT has only ever enjoyed a tiny market share, and with no major library makers supporting the drive, its future now looks very dim. Sony was not prepared to say whether it will develop a third generation S-AIT, but did say that it plans to offer current and future LTO drives alongside S-AIT drives on its PetaSite tape libraries.
The writing has been on the wall for some while. According to tape analyst Freeman Reports almost 90% of all the tape libraries shipped last year were fitted with LTO drives.
Quantum stressed that it has suspended rather than cancelled SDLT development. But with LTO development continuing apace, SDLT is now set to fall behind and the odds of a resurrection of SDLT development are very long.
Quantum has itself been a supplier of LTO drives since 2004 when it wisely bought itself into the technology by acquiring the Seagate spin-off Certance. Yesterday it said that it has struck a deal with HP that will see it take responsibility for design and development of both companies’ LTO drives, while HP handles manufacturing and procurement.
The suspension of development for Quantum’s DLT-V drives means that the only drive technology that Quantum is actively developing is LTO. According to the company, its DLT-V4 drives already offertwice the capacity of rivals such as VXA or DAT.
Reflecting the increasing use of disk-to-disk backup, the tape library market shrunk dramatically last year. Freeman Reports estimates that it shrank by 16% in revenue to $1.8bn. Another source of cold water driving the shrinkage was the continuing increase in tape capacity. Despite the fall in revenue, the total data capacity of library shipments was up 50%.
Last year’s slump in library sales followed double-digit growth in 2004 and 2005. Freeman Reports has predicted just 3% CAGR to 2012 for the market.
Quantum said in a statement that following its purchase of ADIC last year, it is now focusing on its library, disk array, and StorNext file-access software products.
Our View
Tape suppliers like Quantum face a big challenge. Tape still has big advantages over disk because it is much cheaper, and unlike disk it consumes no energy when not in use. It is not going to disappear overnight.
But disk is much faster and easier to use as a backup and recovery target, and data de-duplication techniques – which cannot be applied to tape – are set to bring the effective cost of disk down to around that of tape for backup applications.
This is why the tape market is now set for zero growth over the next few years, and presumably why Quantum no longer considers it worthwhile spending good money developing its DLT-V drives. Why invest in a product with a flat future? If instead you buy Quantum’s official argument that DLT-V is already twice as good as the competition, then that simply reflects the same issue, which is overall the low-end tape market has not been a magnet for development dollars.
Instead tape suppliers have been desperately trying to re-invent themselves as disk suppliers. Their problem is that customers simply don’t think of them as disk makers. It has been five or six years since Quantum shipped its first disk array, but its revenue from its disk and software products in its latest fiscal quarter was just $9m, or 4% of its total revenue.
As for LTO’s success, that has been simply about market presence, and its backing by the giants IBM and HP. S-AIT and SDLT are both technically equal if not superior products to SDLT.
