It’s been two years in the making, but officials with Seagate Technology Inc. say their efforts to create a new generation of super-fast, high-capacity tape storage devices are finally paying off, with a line of new products being introduced this week.
The hard-drive maker, which creates magnetic tape drives at its Removable Storage Solutions operations in Costa Mesa, is launching the Viper 200 today, the first in a line of products designed around a joint standard developed with Hewlett-Packard and IBM.
The standards, called Linear Tape Open, were proposed in 1997 to pave the way for tapes with far higher speeds and greater capacity. More importantly, they use a protocol that will allow tapes to be read on devices made by different manufacturers, just as floppy disk drives can be used on just about any computer.
Despite the announcement, Seagate is demonstrating the product and giving exact specifications only to select customers at this week’s Comdex trade show in Las Vegas. The company will say the device has a storage capacity of about 200 gigabytes per cartridge, compared with today’s maximum 80 gigabytes, and a data transfer rate of up to 40 megabytes per second, compared with about 12 megabytes per second limit today. In addition, the tapes will come with an embedded chip that beams out an index of its contents to speed up searches.
Tape drives typically are used to archive and back up data, and until now most users could read tapes written only by their own computers. This made it difficult to exchange data among different kinds of tape drives and discouraged users from switching brands, a situation blamed for higher prices and stifled innovation in the tape-drive segment.
The new drives are a gamble for Seagate, since users dissatisfied with Seagate products will have an easier time switching to other tape drive makers who use the standard. But as Seagate officials point out, it also could attract new customers and spark more business overall after LTO tape drives become a mainstream storage option.
The launch comes amid a slumping magnetic-storage market, as plunging media prices force manufacturers to generate a demand for storing larger amounts of data. Manufacturers’ prayers may have been answered with the e-commerce explosion and the exponential growth of data it has created for companies to manage.
Seagate, HP and IBM receive an undisclosed licensing fee from companies that adopt the standards (there have been 24 so far, including tape-drive manufacturers, companies that make the tapes, and others) and royalties from each product sold. But Kevin Perry, executive director of marketing and business development for the Costa Mesa operation, said those fees aren’t the ultimate goal.
“You’d be hard-pressed to make a business case for living off the royalty,” he said. “The race is who’s going to have the best products, who’s first to market and who has the best pricing.”
The standard will face competition from Quantum Corp., another formidable name in the hard-drive market, which has announced its own next-generation tape drives using a different standard, called DLT. The competing standard is licensed by one other company, Norway’s Tandberg Data.
Seagate and its LTO partners say they hope their standard revives the tape-drive market, poised to benefit from the massive amount of archived data being created by e-mail and e-commerce.
The devices are still limited by tape’s linear nature: like finding a song in the middle of a cassette, tape drives have to run through the length of a tape to get to data written near the end. But fans say tape drives are good for information that doesn’t need to be accessed instantly, such as archives and backups.
According to Fara Yale, chief analyst at San Jose market research firm Dataquest, the LTO standard should increase competition in the tape-drive area and lower prices. But it won’t be an automatic hit for any manufacturer, she added.
“Crucial elements will be delivering products in a timely manner and delivering products that are highly reliable,” she said. “If they hit the market and have even an ounce of problem, it’s instant death.”
Though the three companies developed the standards together, their cooperation ends there. Each of the companies, and each manufacturer who licenses the technology, will create its own product line based on the standard and certified by an independent standards body.
Perry admits that customer acceptance will be slow at first, a situation he blames on the high cost for users of making the initial jump to the LTO standard. But he expects significant market penetration within 24 months after the formal product launch.
“It’s a key future technology for us,” he said.
