Tape technology is continually evolving, with throughput and capacity doubling every couple of years. Tape system giant Quantum has seen its Digital Liner Tape (DLT) format challenged by a new wave of Ultrium products from the Linear Tape Open (LTO) consortium. Quantum's DLT chief John Gannon gives his assessment.

IT Week: As president of Quantum's DLT Group, you have seen Quantum's once-dominant mid-range tape technology DLT lose a lot of ground to the LTO Ultrium format in recent years. What are you doing to fight back?

John Gannon: We had some problems getting Super DLT (SDLT) technology to market when it was first developed, especially drives offering backwards compatibility to DLT, which were late. The biggest problems related to the qualification process for products. With the introduction of the SDLT320 tape drive at the end of last year we cut the qualification time in half. As a result we've regained a lot of the market share lost to the LTO Ultrium.

The SDLT320 helped Quantum catch up with the LTO consortium. Will second-generation SDLT drives overtake LTO?

We will be shipping our next-generation SDLT600 qualification units this spring, and final products are expected in the summer. At that point we'll regain the technological lead over Ultrium both in terms of capacity and throughput. More than that we expect to maintain that lead in the future, eliminating the continual leapfrogging of the two formats.

HP launched a second-generation Ultrium drive last November and IBM has now followed suit, but not Seagate. Do you see this as a sign that LTO is losing steam?

You always get these problems with consortium developments. It's a good way of getting into a market dominated by an existing technology like Quantum's DLT/SDLT, but it tends to run into problems later on. Especially where one of the members comes out with new product before the others and starts to dictate the standard, as seems to have happened there.

How do you respond to LTO claims that customers are abandoning the DLT/SDLT format because it's only really supported by one company?

Compatibility between the LTO Ultrium drives is a great marketing story, but in practice I know of only a handful of customers who buy drives from more than one vendor. We see backwards compatibility to earlier formats as much more important, and LTO products simply aren't compatible with anything else.

Quantum recently acquired Benchmark Storage Innovations, a company you originally licensed to develop DLT technology for use in low-end tape solutions. Surely it would have been better to have done that development yourselves?

Hindsight's a wonderful thing and I'd like to say we realised that it would take a small, agile, startup like Benchmark to bring a new low-cost platform to market. However, the truth is that we were very much focused on SDLT and saw low-end development as a distraction. We now see the time as right to combine Quantum branding and Benchmark expertise to offer a value product that will be a force to reckon with in the low-end market.

HP and Seagate have announced plans to further develop the low-end DDS tape technology. Do you see this as significant?

That was a very confusing announcement and I'm not sure exactly what HP or Seagate are trying to achieve. There are no hard and fast details of the proposed DDS-5 specification or any timescales, plus Sony, which owns the DAT technology on which DDS is based, has not made its voice heard. What little I do know tells me that DDS-5 will fall far short of the capabilities of our DLT-based Value drives. Bear in mind too that customers will be looking for compatibility moving up to larger systems and that's not possible using DDS.

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ABOUT JOHN GANNON
John Gannon is president of the DLT Group at Quantum, a vendor of tape storage products.

Previously, Gannon was president of the Hard Disk Drive Group when it merged with Maxtor.

Gannon spent 17 years with HP, where he was general manager for HP's worldwide tape business.