Tape Backup Still To Be Reckoned With.

Last month, my column discussed the serious growth of rigid disk drives as a primary backup device, displacing tape technologies. It turns out that this so-called displacement is in a very narrow area. Rigid disks have a new role, but not necessarily the starring role when it comes to low cost backup copies.

Throughout the history of tape and disk storage, the race has always been between capacity and speed. There have been times when capacity has been the central selling proposition for storage; other times, it has been speed, measured as a given capacity per second. The debut of e-commerce has put speed ahead of the pack again. The need to rapidly process orders, check inventory, authorize credit, and set up shipping are speed-intensive processes. An active e-commerce operation has almost no time to spare for restore after a data interruption. Hence, primary backup is on hard disk, at disk speeds.

Does that mean that tape is useless in e-commerce applications? Certainly not. E-commerce operations still need tape for disaster recovery applications, as well as archiving ... the step beyond backup. For these continuing needs, tape remains the most cost-effective medium available. So the answer is no, tape is not dead or even dying; but the question remains ... what's troubling the tape market?

No one denies that the market has been somewhat flat during 1998-1999. Fara Yale, well-known tape analyst at Gartner Group/Dataquest, suggests that the figures have been depressed due to the fact that low-end tape is not being bought. The desktop market for tape is not growing. On the contrary, the desktop user, when he or she backs up at all, backs up to the network server, a high-capacity floppy drive, or a technology, like CD-RW.

The current growth segments in tape technology are the midrange and high-end markets--DDS technology and up. Part of the reason for this growth expectation is that these are the tape products that are sold into automation. Tape automation, according to many of the analysts that I talked to, is the expected growth area in tape technology. Autoloaders and libraries are selling.

Not only that, but they are also selling in new places. We have all followed the growth of the Storage Service Provider (SSP) from their foundations to a growing popularity. They have become a huge sales opportunity for tape libraries. Like Storage Area Networks (SANs), the killer app for the SSP is backup and archival. While the enterprise IT departments may hesitate to trust their primary storage to a service provider outside of the business, they have much more trust in outsourcing the server backup and archival segment.

Market Share Vs. Market Growth

Of course, this year is where S-DLT and LTO (Ultrium) is supposed to be introduced into the midrange. Both technologies are late to market, probably because existing technologies are selling well enough. The introduction of these technologies (actual shippable product, that is) should bring new life to the midrange with its plethora of formats. The new products are expected to stir things up quite a bit in the competitive arena. Market share may do quite a bit of shifting.

That may be part of the problem. So much time is being spent trying to gain market share against competitors that it becomes a goal in itself. The rigid disk drive industry has a lesson to teach there. In 1988, when I started to cover storage for Computer Technology Review, there were over sixty drive vendors. Now, they are counted in single digits. Market share in the RDD industry was the fleeting goal and disk drive vendors would cut margins to a point beneath the bone. Revenues were good, but profit? That was quite another story. Producing drives well beyond demand was one problem, but inventories eventually either shrink or get written off. The real problem was the lie that proclaims: "Greed is good." Anything went, so long as market share increases at some competitor's cost. HDD vendors are now repenting at leisure.

If the tape industry is to learn from this piece of history, the new focus should be on market building. This would involve finding new applications for tape in this dynamic marketplace. Tape-based NAS devices come to mind. So does digital asset management. This outreach especially applies to the tape automation vendors. The better than average market potential in automation is a good place to build new markets for tape technology. Rather than cursing the darkness (a sluggish market), go ahead and light a candle.