Quantum Leaps Toward High-Capacity Tape Backup

The Milpitas, Calif.-based tape drive and automation vendor unveiled the latest iteration of its midrange tape technology, DLT-S4, which provides high-capacity backups on what company officials say is the lowest cost-per-Gbyte archiving media.

The new DLT-S4 tape cartridges from Quantum have a raw capacity of 800 Gbytes, which can be expanded to 1.6 Tbytes with compression. Compressed data throughput for DLT-S4 drives is up to 120 Mbytes per second.

The drives are available with 4-Gbps Fibre Channel, Ultra 320 SCSI or SAS connectivity.

Greg Fredericks, director of product marketing at Quantum, said for archiving purposes, access to data on the cartridges can be locked with user security keys.

The keys also can be used for backing up data in a WORM format. In the near future, Quantum plans to add encryption capabilities to the DLT format, he said.

With the new DLT-S4 format, Quantum is emphasizing capacity over performance, Fredericks said. “As tape becomes an archiving media—and less of a backup media—capacity becomes more important than performance,” he said.

Pat Edwards, vice president of sales at Alliance Technology Group, a Hanover, Md.-based solution provider, said Quantum is bringing out its new tape format just as the industry is looking for higher capacities.

“I don’t have a lot of DLT customers,” Edwards said. “But we are talking to customers about tape drives from StorageTek and IBM. Those drives start at $35,000 to $37,000, with cartridges running about $200 each. It sounds like Quantum could go after this market.”

The new DLT-S4 drives cost much less than previous drives, with list prices starting at $4,495, Fredericks said. Cartridge prices start at $100, which is a break from Quantum’s traditional product rollout pattern of starting new cartridges at $150 and gradually cutting prices, he said.

As a result, the DLT-S4 format offers a cost-per-Gbyte of about 6 cents, compared with a cost-per-Gbyte of 14 cents for the LTO-3, the main rival to DLT, Fredericks said.

The progression to focus on higher-capacity tape is coming as enterprise companies become more open to moving part of their backup processes to disk-based systems, including virtual tape libraries.

Analyst firms Peripheral Concepts, Santa Barbara, Calif., and Coughlin Associates, Atascadero, Calif., jointly conducted a survey earlier this year that found that enterprise companies will be backing up more of their data to disk than to tape in 2006.

In the report, the analysts found that 57 percent of businesses would like to scrap their tape libraries in favor of disk-based systems. The analysts also estimate that about 30 percent of businesses expect to back up 80 percent of their data to disk by 2008, compared with about 17 percent of businesses that currently do so.