The Tape Storage Battle Has Begun, Again
It’s time to ring the bell for another round of sparring between tape storage heavyweights. The first points to be tallied go to Certance, which released its LTO-3 Tape drives within weeks of the rollout of LTO-3 licenses and months before analysts expected them to hit the market.Certance, a division of Seagate, has been dunking it out with Quantum Technology over the tape storage market for years. A successor to Digital Equipment Corporation's storage division, Quantum holds the rights to the DLT Tapes and SuperDLT standards, in direct competition with LTO.
The new release from Certance is one of many in the back-and-forth cycle of one-upsmanship that has been going on for years between LTO and DLT standards. The cycle is a boon to the data center, which has seen exponential increases in tape capacity and transfer rates during the past half-decade.
LTO
This time, LTO-2 tape users are going to see capacity and data transfer rates double with an upgrade to the third generation of LTO. LTO-3 features 400GB of native capacity, with data transfer rates from 80Mbps to 160Mbps depending on compression. The transition from LTO-2 should be smooth, with the new LTO-3 drives offering both read and write backward-compatibility with LTO-2 tapes. The new standard even provides some backward-compatibility with LTO-1 tapes, allowing users to at least read these tapes with their newer drives.
Released in August, the Certance CL 800 is the first model to feature these new specs. Priced at approximately $6,000, the new unit comes in internal, external, or rackmount form with an Ultra 160 SCSI interface. (Fibre Channel drives are expected by year's end.) Because LTO technology is under development with the cooperation of a number of manufacturers, buyers should have the opportunity to choose among a number of LTO-3 devices as soon as manufacturers such as HP and IBM follow Certance's lead.
This is in contrast with Quantum's proprietary SDLT tapes technology, which is released through the company and a few of its select partners. Now Quantum has some catching up to do as its most up-to-date standard, SDLT 600, has only a 300GB native storage capacity and a data transfer rate of 72Mbps. The company doesn't plan on rolling out an update until next year, when it promises to double the capacity. But the early release of LTO-3 licensing shows that it is possible to advance tape storage more quickly than expected. It still remains to be seen whether Quantum is as nimble as the LTO consortium of researchers, though.
No matter how long the wait, it won't do much to improve SDLT's market share. LTO is already winning the battle for tape supremacy. Forecasting from Freeman Reports estimates that by the end of the year, DLT/SDLT equipment sales will only reach $559 million, compared to LTO revenue of $886 million.
Quantum's SDLT 600 does still have a couple of advantages over LTO-3. The most obvious is affordability, coupled with newly released support for WORM. Last month Quantum extended WORM support free of charge to all of its SDLT 600 products through the installation of its new DLTice software. LTO-3 is still lacking this critical feature, with developers promising WORM support in the very near future.
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1 comment:
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