The Future Of Desktop Tape Systems.

Two-and-a-half decades ago (I know, but history can be important), QIC was starting to make tape products for minicomputers. Even then, its low-end products were used only sparingly on desktop, but the seed was planted. By the time another decade passed, QIC-based technologies such as Travan became extremely popular on the desktop with several million shipped every year. It featured the same advantages it does today: low cost, reliable, high capacity, and user friendly. That was the heyday of desktop tape. Then, seven to eight years ago, Zip products came on the market, followed later by DVD and CD-RW products. Primarily because of these competing technologies, tape was pushed from its preeminent position and manufacturers shipped considerably fewer products.

Still, though many manufacturers began concentrating on the enterprise tape market, products to the desktop/SOHO market just kept coming. That's because whether on the desktop or in the enterprise, tape couldn't be beat for reliability, availability, cost-effectiveness, and capacity.

Yet today's market challenges in the SOHO arena are changing and tape products are changing with them. According to Onstream, present market drivers for the SOHO/desktop market include:

* Digital content explosion with MP3 audio, MPEG video, digital imaging, etc.

* Ubiquitous Internet.

* Fast, easy downloading via cable modems and DSL.

* Digital convergence between office and entertainment.

* Easier and more available graphic content creation tools.

So where does any removable storage device fit in with hard drive space continually increasing? Hard drive space is growing at a rate greater than 100% per year and is cheap to boot. (A Maxtor 40.9GB IDE HDD selling for $279 in catalogs-now that's reasonable, at least for the consumer!) That kind of space is outpacing most PC users' storage needs, which averages 10GB today, according to Dataquest.

But...

Onstream predicts that video will soon fill up those large hard drives and, frankly, no user in their right mind wants to blithely replace their hard drive every few months. Among the other solutions, including Zip, Jaz, Orb, CDRW, and rewritable DVD, tape still has a distinct price and capacity advantage. Its speed (or lack thereof) is rarely an issue outside of video and audio playback, but as tape is primarily used for backup, time to file is not usually critical. Price is much more sensitive.

Yet the challenges facing secondary storage solutions are real and include the lack of automated backup, some device capacity not keeping pace with hard drives, required media shuffling, chaotic file organization and retrieval, plus, everyone's least favorite question--"Now, where did I back up that file???!!!" In addition, tape has trouble handling the after effects of the digital explosion--it has capacity, but cannot play back video. So where is desktop tape going now?

The One And Future Solution

The present technologies for this market include Travan drives for the small business market, low-end DAT/DDS drives for Workstations, and Onstream's ADR, whose software handles video playback. In a market, which is extremely price conscious, they remain the best buy for the money-reliable, good capacity, easily available.

The Travan drives have recently benefited from Overland Data's VR2 technology, which it has licensed to Seagate, Tandberg Data, and Imation. Tandberg Data's desktop product line is the TR-4, scalable through their network series NS8 Pro and NS20 Pro. In their server and midrange SLR line, the new SLR-40 is also suited for the desktop market. Imation recently shipped a FireWire model for use in Macintosh environments. The FireWire interface is a fast peripheral standard for use with multimedia and high-speed devices. The Travan FireWire drive delivers up to 20GB with a 60MB uncompressed transfer rate in a backup solution targeted to digital video, graphics, and other storage-intensive applications. Seagate markets its Hornet Travan to the workstation market and scales with its TapeStor Travan tape drive, which contains an NT Workstation outfitted with a Hornet Travan tape drive and VERITAS' Backup Exec Desktop.

Onstream has another interesting approach to the desktop market. The company "has a very well established distribution channel with a lot of enthusiasm about the market," says Bob Abraham, editor-in-chief of Freeman Reports. Onstream's ADR (Advanced Digital Recording) is an eight channel drive technology with a variable speed motor and servo track. Priced for the SOHO market, it offers 15GB native. Its accompanying Echo software provides a file management system like Windows Explorer, automatic backup, catalog software--and, for that pesky playback problem, video and audio playback directly from tape.

Although the market for this type of solution has diminished lately, these and other major manufacturers are developing and shipping tape drives for the SOHO market, primarily distributing by bundling at the point of sale and through the after-sale market--print catalogs, online orders, retail stores.

Will the market take off again? Zophar Sante of Tandberg Data says, "The 'tape is dead' school is itself barely breathing, as tape continues to be an important part of backup and archiving solutions in the enterprise. There is a question, however: Are desktop tape solutions dead? A lot of tape companies don't think so and are selling to the desktop market, but it does require a specialized approach."

I believe that the desktop market will stay steady or even grow, especially as home and small business computer users get used to downloading and storing huge multimedia files. Of course, the real trick isn't getting them to buy a backup solution; it's getting them to use it, but that's a different story.

An up-to-date listing of desktop tape vendors can be found at wwpi.com.