From: Docusultant (Original Message) Sent: 12/5/2002 5:49 PM
A New Tape Standard in the Offing?
Tandberg Data says that O-MASS tape is around the corner. What is it,
and why should we be interested in yet another tape standard?
By Jon William Toigo
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Tan Khiang, sales director for the Australian and New Zealand markets
at Tandberg Data, provided an energetic pitch for O-MASS when we met at
Terrapinn's Storage World Conference at the Sydney Convention and
Exhibition Centre in Sydney, Australia. O-MASS, which is both the
acronym for a new tape standard and the name of a Tandberg subsidiary
company, combines optical and magnetic recording technologies to enable
a dramatic improvement in tape capacity and transfer rate at a
competitive price point.
When products based on the technology are introduced to market in the
first half of 2005, Tan believes that Tandberg Data will realize its
goal of moving from a provider of PC and small server tape backup
solutions toward becoming a contender in the broader enterprise open
systems market dominated by Quantum Digital Linear Tape (DLT) and
Linear Tape Open (LTO) consortium products.
O-MASS combines an magneto-optical read head, an inductive thin film
planar write head, and new, wider media to deliver a 1.2 Terabyte
native storage capacity and a 64 megabyte per second (MB/s) transfer
rate. Tan says that current demo drives are providing 600GB native
capacity -- not quite the promised 1 TB+ in the brochure, but
respectable nonetheless.
The new tape standard represents a quantum leap of sorts for Oslo,
Norway-based Tandberg Data. The company has long offered products
based on a proprietary tape standard known as Scaleable Linear
Reliability, or SLR, that currently offers 50 GB capacity with a road
map to 200 GB. While SLR is not well known in the USA, it is extremely
popular elsewhere in the world, according to Tan, who adds that the
product holds the number one position in the Australian and New Zealand
markets for small capacity server backup solutions and regularly trades
the market share leader position in India with products from Hewlett-
Packard.
Over coffee, Tan shared several printed e-mails from customers who used
both DLT and SLR products in their environments. One asked whether
there was an SLR-based replacement in the offing for DLT, the Quantum
tape solution for which Tandberg received global (except USA) reseller
rights last year. The query was based on the customer's comparison of
failure rates that he had experienced with his DLT products and the
"flawless performance" of SLR backup systems in the same timeframe.
Tan said that Tandberg's reputation for reliability would transfer to
its O-MASS products, enabling O-MASS to compete with higher end tape
products.
When the first O-MASS products ship, they will have the edge over
competitive standards, based on the stated roadmaps of other vendors.
Super DLT will have a capacity of between 320 and 640 GB when O-MASS is
released, LTO will offer 400 GB, and Sony's Super AIT (SAIT) format
will offer 1 TB of native capacity. The roadmap for O-MASS, as
announced on November 11 by the company and its key investor, Imation,
anticipates capacity improvements every 18 months until a goal of 20 TB
per tape is achieved.
Despite this aggressive roadmap and the demonstrated achievements in
prototype products already in the laboratory, it is possible that O-
MASS will be slow to enter US markets, which have already become
harvest markets for the likes of Quantum, and LTO partners Seagate, IBM
and HP. If O-MASS does cultivate some US market share, it will be
through Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) relationships between
Tandberg Data and other system providers, or through the enlightened
self-interest of resellers and distributors. According to Tan, the
company has no direct sales force and is totally channel driven.
"Tandberg is improving its visibility by offering its own libraries,"
Tan notes, adding that the SDLT libraries now offered by the firm
complement its "sweet spot" SLR libraries serving small- and medium-
sized businesses. Whether O-MASS will help make the company's direct
sales reach critical mass remains to be seen.
Technically speaking, O-MASS is a completely new approach to tape,
using track packages separated by guard bands, rather than traditional
interleaving techniques. This enables much higher data densities to be
achieved with the new technology.
The O-MASS approach also allows the writing of 32 parallel tracks
simultaneously, improving transfer rates over traditional tape methods
that typically support parallel writes to only eight tracks
simultaneously. O-MASS' optical read-write head positioning system
enables greater track density on the media and mitigates the impact of
thermal and hygroscopic media expansion and mechanical instability that
force other vendors to build in much larger track separation into their
products, reducing density and capacity.
All in all, the technology looks great on paper and might provide
greater runway for tape in the face of challenges from low cost IDE/ATA
and Serial ATA disk arrays. The latter are already beginning to cut
into the traditional tape market as alternative, lower cost targets for
backup and restore operations.
Watch this space for more on O-MASS
Original Post