Exabyte Brings New Tape Opportunities To The Channel

Kerry Brock, vice president of marketing at Exabyte, recently talked tape and the channel with Michael Vizard, Editor in Chief, and Joseph F. Kovar, Senior Editor.

CRN: Can you get us up to speed on where you are in the channel?

BROCK: The great thing about Exabyte is, we've always been a channel company. We don't sell direct. We sell everything through the channel and today, we are the only vendor in the industry that focuses on the SMB tape market. For that reason, we think we do a pretty good job of it. We believe we are the best vendor to partner with for tape. Our partners at authorized and premier levels get discounts when they buy product from distribution at the time of purchase, which gives them extra margin up front every time they buy our products. And then we have several other programs like deal registration and spif programs to add extra margins.

CRN: What percentage of your channel is traditional VARs, and what percentage is system builders?

BROCK: The vast majority of our partners today are traditional VARs. White-box VARs are not a big part of our mix. Yet.

CRN: Will there be some forthcoming white-box program?

BROCK: That's something you can expect to see from Exabyte, yes.

CRN: A lot of people are talking about tape being dead or marginalized because of disk-based backup. What's your take on that whole trend, and where do the pieces fit?

BROCK: For many, if not most SMBs today, tape is their complete disaster recovery. For anyone to suppose that tape is going to go away, and that disk-to-disk is the answer to the world's problems, is gravely mistaken. Virtually all of the analysts and luminaries you talk to today--even those who believe in disk-to-disk--always say it is a disk-to-disk-to-tape solution.

CRN: So there will be tiers?

BROCK: Absolutely. If you look at the whole backup and information life-cycle management of where data needs to go--let's look at the SMB market in particular. The vast majority of those people today do not need near-line backup. Or at least they voted that way with their pocketbooks. The customers we talk to have told us that tape is great for disaster recovery, [and] is sufficient for their backup and recovery needs at this time.

CRN: What's coming down the pike in tape that will get people excited and want to upgrade or will bring some sort of renewal around tape subsystems?

BROCK: Many customers out there are running out of capacity, whose speed is not sufficient for what they're doing, and who are using systems that have just not done well. You get VARs excited about tape by understanding the importance of it. Frankly, I think it's overlooked too much from the VAR's perspective. It's just, oh, yeah, it's just tape.

But there's tremendous opportunity to go out and audit disaster-recovery systems, to audit backup systems, to make sure they're working properly. Make sure their speed and capacity and all the critical issues are being looked at.

CRN: Do you guys feel any need to hook up with any of the disk vendors to create some kind of hierarchical approach that involves disk and tape for archiving?

BROCK: We actually are in the process of putting a bundle together with Snap Appliance that we're test-marketing with some selected resellers. We see disk-to-disk-to-tape as a great solution. There are a certain subset of customers that need that today. And we are looking to address that.

CRN: Are you planning any changes to your channel program? What is your actual goal in terms of number of VARs?

BROCK: We have over 1,000 VARs, but they very seldom run into each other. Given the size of our market, millions of small and midsize businesses, we need more VARs to be successful. So there's a great opportunity for many more VARs out there.

[We have just announced] the VXA X Tape. We're doing something unique. The majority of the SMB world today is DDS users. DDS users have been using DDS for a number of years because it's very affordable. The cost of the drives has traditionally been under $1,000, and the tapes have been in the $10 to $25 range, depending on the size of the DDS and how long it's been out there.

There really has been no alternative to these customers who have meager dollars and resources. Because of that, they've had to put up with trade-offs for the cost. And that is lower capacity, slower speed, and questionable reliability. All of that is changing with our X Tape. DDS users can now painlessly roll over to a new technology for about the same price.

The great thing about X Tape also is that we're offering three different capacities for the same drive. So if a DDS user wants to move over to better technology but not spend more money on higher-capacity cartridges, they can do that very affordably, very easily. And then, as their data set grows, they can scale up by simple using a larger tape.

The tapes we have, native capacities are 20 Gbytes, 40 Gbytes and 80 Gbytes.

CRN: Is the drive itself new, or just the cartridges?

BROCK: The cartridges are the new part. And the new part is lower capacities and much more affordable prices.