Tape makers strap on skis, glide down slope to oblivion
$169m sales in a quarter - are you taking the piste?
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Figures from number-crunchers at Santa Clara Consulting Group show a tape market with no bottom in sight - yet. Increasingly, storage standard Linear Tape-Open (LTO) is the tape market.
The group's quarterly tape industry tracker shows global backup tape cartridge sales amounted to $169.10m (£106m) in the second quarter of this year, down 9 per cent from $185.5m (£116m) a year ago, and $188.2m (£118m) in the first quarter of 2012. LTO cartridge sales were $153.9m (£96m) in the second quarter, 91 per cent of the total. DDS and DAT sales managed a mere $6.6m (£4.1m), down 26 per cent from the year-ago figure of $8.85m (£5.5m).
Tape's gentle sloping downward trend, in terms of revenue
Plotting the quarterly numbers on a chart shows pronounced seasonality - the last and first quarters of a year being higher than the middle two quarters - and also a pronounced overall decline.
We can see that LTO format tapes are taking an increased proportion of the overall market. The reasons for this is that the openness of the LTO format standard (HP, IBM and Quantum support it) is preferred by customers over proprietary formats, such as DLT.
Below the LTO sector the DDS/DAT formats have prevailed over competing ones, such as QIC and Sony's AIT.
The tape market in general is declining because disk-to-disk backup is faster than tape, particularly in restoration, and deduplication makes drives affordable enough even though they are more expensive generally than tape. The time taken to restore from backups is more important than cash saved by not using disk.
With the archive market - tape's last bastion outside its mainframe niche - under assault from Amazon's cloud archive storage using object storage technology and spun-down disks, and with other cloud players set to follow suit, we can expect the tape market to decline further. The day when tape automation vendors decide the game is up draws nearer. ®
COMMENTS
Ah the memories!
My first "IT" job was working as a tape monkey in a server room, or rather a dozen server rooms scattered around campus.
Hauling those flight cases full of DATs and DLTs was muscle-building stuff.
Restores were great, as you could pretty much guarantee the offsite storage guys would bring you the wrong box of tapes. If by some miracle you got the tapes you needed, they'd be unreadable...
Simpler times...
Re: Ah the memories!
DATs and DLTs? When I were a lad, or rather a data processing trainee, we had proper tape decks with big 9-track tape reels and write permit rings. Those were the days! My first useful job was converting tape-based batch update systems to direct access i.e. exchangeable disc stores. More than 40 years later I've been converting our talking newspaper from compact cassettes to USB flash drives.
Re: Tape hasn't kept up with capacity
Completely agreed; tape has no financial advantage for personal use. Accordingly, the personal market for tape is basically non-existent. Businesses, on the other hand, comprise nearly 100% of the tape market and there remain great benefit for tape for business. Archive is still less expensive on tape than disk in many cases, even when you add the thousands of pounds/dollars the tape drives cost.
Back to your question about average systems, there are many small and medium businesses that have less than 5TB of data that need archived or backed up. There are others that have PBs of data to protect. There's no useful definition of "average".
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