Tape Proves It's Here To Stay

When it comes to tape technology, one might paraphrase Mark Twain: rumors of its death have been greatly exaggerated. Falling hard drive prices and other factors have led some to speculate that tape backup will be replaced by other solutions. Not so, say mass storage vendors. "For as long as tape has been around, people have been asking how long it will be viable, especially as hard drive prices fall," says Christopher Calisi, president and CEO of Overland Data, Inc. "I'm confident tape will remain the primary choice above and beyond that and any other factors because of its stability and 30-year life span. In addition, the capacity of tape media is growing at a faster rate than ever. With SDLT, for instance, we're looking at being able to handle a TB in 5-6 years. This outstrips the growth rates for hard disks and the price per MB still comes out ahead."

"Systems today should not be developed without tape," contends Tom Yuhas, general manager of Sony Data Systems and Transmission Systems. "When developing systems which provide transparent access and cost effective utilization of a combination of technologies, tape today still provides the best combination of fast transfer, high capacity, and cost per MB available in the market place." These functions are supplemented by the stability of the media and the fact that, unlike disk storage, it is removable. As a result, users can store tapes outside a library or even off-site for an extra level of security. Tape also has a higher capacity and writing speed than optical media.

Number Of Format Choices Reinforces Tape's Viability
Ongoing innovations in tape technology are evidence that there is enough industry confidence to foster continued investment. It also ensures that the technology is adapted to meet the changing needs of today's solutions. The growing number of tape formats may be a source of frustration for VARs and end users, but it is a sign that vendors are willing to compete for that market. "The number of formats is really a benefit for everyone in the industry," says Calisi. "If there were just one or two formats, there would be much less drive from vendors to increase features." Calisi admits that the multitude of choices is challenging, requiring VARs to know the capabilities of each tape format and how to match them to customer needs. "But it's a small price to pay for great products."

The variety of choices actually pays off for VARs as that becomes part of the value they can offer customers. "I believe that every tape format has been developed to address specific applications," comments Yuhas. "Customers are looking to consolidate their applications and hardware systems. This is refocusing their use of such tape formats. By working with the customer to determine specific needs, VARs can customize a system which best addresses the customer's specific applications using the most appropriate tape technology."

In fact, an IDC study conducted in the fourth quarter of 2001 found that end users overwhelmingly prefer to buy tape solutions from resellers. Though the specific percentages were not publicly available at press time, Janet Waxman, IDC's program director for hardware channels, says that more than half the respondents across the board prefer to deal with an integrator for tape solutions. According to Waxman, those percentages vary according to the type of product. She notes that end users often cite integrators' expertise in assessing both a single component and working with multivendor systems.

Margins on tape automation hardware are also strong, according to Russell Stern, COO of Quantum|ATL. He estimates that many VARs are realizing 25% to 40% margins on enterprise products. "In a dialog with some industry data experts, we recently learned that tape automation has been able to maintain value to VARs. Many of these VARs are also selling primary storage, so they are competing heavily with platform providers. In order to maintain presence and market share, those players are willing to go in and cut VAR margins. This is less likely with tape because they don't manufacture it and have no interest in manufacturing it. They will never go into tape automation either because it's too much development or too small a part of their strategy. Integrators providing tape have more value to bring to a customer than a primary storage vendor can deliver."

Stern points out that another economic advantage of vendor competition is lower cost. When the price of hardware comes down, VARs can lower the total price tag on an overall solution without compromising service revenue. As a result, the market is constantly expanding as resellers can go back to customers who couldn't afford a solution previously.

Vendors Continue To Do More With Less Space
The smaller footprint (physical size) of tape hardware makes it an easier sale for some VARs. "During the dot-com boom, the growth of mass farms of servers meant users looked for smallest possible footprint," recalls Calisi. "We don't see that kind of constraint anymore, but users still look for compact units."

Even if end users don't see that need right now, Stern advises that VARs choose smaller hardware when possible. "Experts can reasonably assure that data will double every year. If space isn't an issue now, it will be. In a recent competitive analysis, we found that a three or four to one floor space advantage is huge in terms of cost." With floor space in a data center costing about $60 a square foot, according to Stern, fitting a solution that once required as much as 40 feet into 10 or 11 could save a customer $1,200 a month over a three- or four-year life span.

Meet SAN's Demands - Even If There's No SAN
Connectivity options are another way tape hardware vendors are ensuring their place in future solutions. This is especially true in terms of the adoption rate of Fibre Channel SANs. Both Calisi and Stern advise VARs to make sure they stay informed about evolving protocols and look for open-ended hardware that can support today's connectivity like SCSI or Fibre Channel, as well as be adapted to emerging technologies such as iSCSI or InfiniBand. "Right now it's mainly the high end implementing Fibre Channel SAN," observes Calisi. "As the price drops, more and more small- and medium-sized businesses will realize benefits of SAN. As the quantity of data continues to grow, moving it over a corporate LAN will start to hurt. People will be looking for more economical ways to incorporate SANs." Another promising protocol is 10 Gbit Ethernet because it uses the existing infrastructure, eliminating recabling.

SANs have also made demands on the capabilities of the hardware. "One of the clearer central driving themes for SANs is the ability to share resources and manage all backup in one place, and tape vendors are working to provide that capability," says Stern. Calisi points out that this is a function of all components from media with the highest possible transfer rates to robotics that can retrieve cartridges quickly.

Since the overwhelming number of tape installations are as backup and recovery tools, talk of serverless backup is obviously very interesting to tape vendors hoping to claim a share of the SAN market. A hot industry buzzword, serverless backup involves offloading a data "snapshot" from the server, reducing backup windows and preserving server performance in a SAN. The snapshot can be copied to tape or disk.

"In the short haul, there's not a lot of screaming for it," says Stern, as most companies are still finding off-peak times to perform backup. "Longer term, I believe industry will deliver. Backup companies are just now beginning to put in their packages, and they require some hardware functionality. VARs can't ignore that implementing serverless backup will require new software and hardware investments, so problems better be pretty severe before they're willing to make the switch. I don't think end users' backs are up against the wall to that extent, but that could change by the end of next calendar year."

However, Stern doesn't necessarily believe that serverless backup will be the only way to accommodate shrinking backup windows in demanding SAN environments. Vendors have already begun responding with hardware that has scalability and speed to stream data faster. "It's the same thing that's happening in many tech spaces," comments Rob Pickell, Quantum's VP of marketing. "People expend a lot of effort solving for a constraint that no longer exists by the time the solution is realized because other components have compensated."

Ask Your Vendor To Send You Down The Right Path
"When choosing a tape format VARs should always be cognizant of the tape format's migration path," says Yuhas. "After all, your customer's data needs to be available from now into the future." Maintaining customer relationships long term depends on the ability to guide them through the evolving technology unscathed.

Many customers, too, are concerned about maintaining these relationships. Waxman says that customers like having a consistent local contact, and channel sales forces have much less employee turnover than other IT businesses, including direct sales teams. "One customer reported to us that his organization had enormous turnover in its IT department, and the only one who knew the history of the system was the VAR," comments Waxman.

VARs need to know the migration path both along the same tape format family as well as when converting from an entirely different one. "The move from DLT (digital linear tape) 7000 to SDLT (super DLT), for example, has a discrete set of issues," says Stern. "If a DLT shop wants to move to LTO (linear tape-open), automation suppliers play a role in how that gets done efficiently. In addition to training and support, vendors offer white papers, marketing collateral, and other resources. A vendor is almost the only place a VAR will find that information because of the kinds of things we do to bring a product to market."