The Passing Of An Era...Well, Sort Of.

It's the biggest announcement that never was: the news that Sony, HP, and Seagate would not develop DDS-5 technology.

In fact, there has been no such announcement. Much of the evidence about HP, Sony and Seagate no longer developing DDS-5 has as much to do with their adopting additional products and options than with the companies' reluctance to announce a decision one way or the other. HP, for example, has recently made a deal with Benchmark to sell its DLT1 product. Not to be outdone, Sony is developing and offering its lower-priced AIT product.

There is no doubt that DDS is a viable product, and manufacturers are still shipping DDS drives back to the second generation. (DDS-1 kept shipping as late as 1997.) But new removable media technologies in DDS's market space is threatening its long supremacy. These technologies include Benchmark's DLT1, Sony's value-priced AIT, Ecrix's VXA1 and Onstream's ADR.

DDS - Alive and Kicking 

"This is removable media. It's sometimes a love-hate relationship, but people love it. You don't just dump removable media," said Bob Abraham, editor-in-chief of Freeman Reports.

DDS-2, DDS-3 and DDS-4 are very much alive and kicking in the marketplace, and DDS remains the tape drive of choice with OEMs serving its market space. The technology is due to ship strongly throughout much of the next decade, at least through 2008. Even if DDS-5 did ship, Abraham believes that it would only extend the DDS line another two or three years at best. In the meantime, it remains a vital technology that still brings in strong profits. Thus the decision: stay with profitable DDS and its development costs, or abandon development and adopt new technologies that may be more expensive now, but have improved capacity?

DDS has been around for a long time. Sony and HP developed DDS-1 back in 1987, so 1999's DDS-4 is the latest in a long line of DDS drives. The Latest generation offers 20GB capacity uncompressed, and up to 3MB native transfer rate. Other features are Read-After-Write, PRML (Partial Response Maximum Likelihood), Timed Tracking, proven reliability with an installed base of over 7 million units, and a low cost of ownership--not to mention its availability via a multi-vendor approach to product development and market expansion.

While the DDS tape format is the most widely accepted tape backup solution on the PC server market, and remains a viable and profitable product, successive generations have taken longer to develop and delivered smaller gains in performance. For example, DDS-3, released in 1995, was the third generation drive. It delivered three times the capacity of DDS-2, and it took two years to develop. DDS-4, however, was released in 1999, four years after DDS-3, and it does not even double capacity. This trend has raised concerns with some that there will never be a DDS-5 drive.

Not everyone, though. Abraham believes that the decision to not pursue DDS-5 will be a business decision, not a technology one. HP even says it's still got DDS-5 in its development labs. Their concern is not the technology, which they say remains sound. Their concern is a business decision: whether or not to develop and support DDS in its migration path, or to give way to and actively support new technologies now crowding the field. The question: will DDS warrant its return on investment in its market space? It has before, and still dominates an active space. But now the field is crowded with contenders, and profit margins are eroding. With the costs of developing DDS-5, shipping, and support, does it make sense to continue--especially when companies can still do a brisk business selling DDS throughout this decade?

The Challengers

Bob Amatruda, IDC senior analyst, tape and removable storage, calls DDS-5 development an issue of diminishing returns. "Past 18 months to two years, DDS has been under siege on the desktop." The large opportunities now are for direct server-attached tape, and drives that are designed for automation.

Benchmark DLT1. Benchmark's products seem to be the likeliest heir to the line, always keeping in mind that DDS is still quite healthy, thank you very much. But Benchmark has recently made deals with both HP and Dell for its DLT1 product. HP will include it in its data-protection portfolio, and Dell in its PowerVault data storage line.

Frank Salmon, managing director of CMS Peripherals commented that, "With the uncertainty in the DDS roadmap beyond DDS-4 the market is ready for alternative, suitably priced backup technologies and Benchmark is leading the way in this market."

Mike Befeler, vice president of business development for Benchmark, spoke about the Dell adoption in a release. "This is a very important announcement for the company and we hope it will lead to additional business," he said. "We are under evaluation by eight other OEMs and we hope this will light a fire under the others. One of the inhibitors of the adoption of DLT over DDS is a step up in price. Eventually, down the road, DDS will phase out. Right now it's questionable whether there will be a DDS-5 format. But there's still an extensive installed base for DDS systems and it will be an extended period of time before it goes away. We're working on broadening the DLT product family. We represent a good migration up from the DDS space."

Right now HP & Dell are looking at DLT1 not as a substitute for DDS but an opportunity for incremental revenue. It's higher priced than DDS-4 in a price-sensitive space, but it is certainly robust. Since OEMs are using DLT1 to buffer or build up adjacent market space, as Abraham said, "If DDS-5 doesn't materialize, it's well positioned to be the heir."

Sony AIT-1. Sony developed AIT (Advanced Intelligent Tape) in 1996. It is shipping both AIT-1 and AIT-2, with AIT-3 slated to ship later this year. The lowest-priced series in the AIT-1 line is Sony's contribution to the DDS market space. The drive offers a fast access, high-density tape that can handle backup for large-scale network servers and large volumes of images and other storage-intensive data.

The drive uses AME technology where the magnetic layers are made of 100% cobalt material, a recording surface with twice the magnetic flux density of coated media, offering improved levels of recording density and recording system performance. The AIT-1 rates at 25GB native with a 3MB transfer rate. The servo tracking system permits high-density recording through accurate tracking using embedded servo bursts, while an encoding system optimizes the media and head performance.

Onstream ADR. Philips developed Advanced Digital Recorder (ADR) technology. In 1999 it created Onstream as a spin-off company and released the first high-capacity IDE tape drive based on ADR technology. The first ADR drives delivered 15GB native capacity per tape cartridge, and offer a reasonably-priced option for backing up the multi-gigabyte hard drives that have become commonplace on many desktop systems.

Onstream has made a serious commitment to pursuing the SOHO market as well as the workgroup and departmental space, and is deliberately positioning its product as an alternative to DDS. Combined with their Echo software, ADR handles video and audio file backup, as well as efficient backup, catalog and restore procedures.

Its pricing sets it solidly in the DDS space, with comparable drive prices for 25GB native capacity and reasonably-priced media.

Ecrix VXA1. VXA1 has won a slew of awards for its three-pronged approach, including discrete packet format, variable speed operation and OverScan Operation. Packetizing provides new levels of reliability and performance, variable speeds eliminate backhitching, and OverScan reads data from any physical location on the tape, without having to follow tracks from beginning to end. This gives a boost to reliability, data retrieval, and interchange.

However, Ecrix has the same challenge Onstream does: they're courting the OEM market hut haven't seen gains in that area, while Benchmark is selling to Dell and HP. Amatruda said, "I think both can make a business in distribution, but to validate the technology it really needs an OEM."

In fact, DDS is still the most popular recording format with OEMs. It's just not going to disappear overnight, especially since no other product can yet match its combination of capacity, price point and availability.

Will they ever? Someday. DLT1 and AIT-1 will be competitive, especially if DLT1 hits high volumes and drops in price. But with assured customer support from IBM and other DDS providers, DDS users don't have to seriously consider migrating for the next five or six years.

In the removable media market, long life cycles are common. Even if DDS-5 is put out to pasture, the DDS products will remain strong for years to come. As Abraham said, "A lot of the users would rather fight than switch."

Editor's Note: A listing of DDS vendors can be found at www.wwpi.com.