What the press had to say...

“Vive DAT storage – the rollout of DAT 320 indicates that magnetic tape – and the DAT format in particular – is still alive, companies are still investing in it, and firms consider it a viable option for protecting and preserving data.” – TechNewsWorld

“HP and Sony Dive into DAT - Sony makes its return to the world of DAT and plans high-capacity drive with HP” – Byte and Switch

“HP and Sony double team better storage tape format – Hewlett-Packard and Sony are putting their heads together again to make a denser breed of Digital Audio Tape drives and cassettes.” – The Register

“Tape is back in Vogue as Terabyte Tape and SuperDAT come to Life – The format seems to be making a comeback as big brands like HP, Sony, Sun and IBM breathe life back into it. HP in collaboration with Sony has decided to work on DAT that can work for the seventh generation of Digital Data Storage.” – IT Pro Portal

“DAT/DDS the tape format that will not die – after an absence of five or six years, and two generations, DDS trademark owner Sony is rejoining HP in supporting the seventh generation of DAT drive.” – Information Week

“Tape storage gets a make-over – The business world has long relied on tape storage as a cost-effective medium for protecting critical business data from becoming lost due to system failure, operator errors, theft and natural disasters. The good news for many enterprises is that an aging technology that has long lain dormant is once again springing back to life through the launch of new products spanning the small to very large business environments.

...Moreover HP and Sony now say they will be partnering in the creation of a next-generation DAT format that will deliver improved performance and capacity over current DAT tape offerings.

An ideal choice. Many small to midsize businesses currently rely on DAT to backup and restor critical business data So it’s no wonder that many tape customers are concerned about outgrowing their existing tape drives and do not want to switch away from a cost-effective and trusted technology like DAT/DDS.” - TopTechNews

“Is tape dead in the SMB market? HP and Sony think not – HP and Sony Corporation are renewing their partnership to jointly develop the next generation of Digital Audio Tape format: the DAT 320, which will offer 320 GB of capacity on a single cartridge....So, it would appear that tape is not dead and won’t be for some time. Online archiving vendors shouldn’t plan on cornering the SMB marketplace anytime soon.” – Computer Technology Review

“Sony, HP build a better backup tape - Sony and HP have bumped up capacity and performance of the digital audio tape format used by some businesses to store and backup corporate data. Though disk-based systems are on the rise, the reality is that existing tape users need enhancement to the technologies that they are using and rely upon, including DAT.” - TechNewsWorld

“Digital Audio Tape becomes an HP-Sony project – Twofold boost. With backup speeds of up to 86Gbyte per hour with 2:1 data compression, the DAT 320 will offer up to 320 Gbytes of capacity on a single cartridge – compared with 160 Gbytes available from the current DAT 160 format. The DAT 320 also will consume fewer watts per gigabyte than previous generations and will be backwards compatible with the DAT 160.” EE Times Asia

What the analysts had to say...

“DAT’s 320’s ability to store more data in a given footprint can help to address financial costs, power usage and cooling floor space. For inactive and archive data or offline data storage needs, tape remains one of the greenest forms of data storage.” Greg Schulz, Founder and Senior Analyst StorageIO Group

“Tape customers are concerned about outgrowing their existing tape drives and do not want to switch away from a cost-effective and trusted technology like DAT...the doubled capacity of the DAT 320 will be an ideal choice for small to midsize businesses who have limited space for extra hardware.” Robert Amatruda, Research Director IDC

In conclusion

The DAT 320 announcement by HP and Sony has been extremely positively received by both press and analysts. Coupled with the announcements in the same week of companies launching 1TB tape drives, the news was to have an overall effect on tape coverage in general. For example, in IT Business Edge Arthur Cole reported:

“Renewed interest in tape is most likely the outgrowth of the increased storage requirements that are hitting all levels of the enterprise industry. Disk-based systems have been getting most of the headlines of late, so it’s refreshing to know that there is still a healthy development track for low-end backup and recovery.”

Indeed significant investment in tape technologies such as DAT 320 continues as storage vendors seek to deliver tape drives that meet ongoing customer requirements for cost-effective, reliable, long-term data protection.

9/22/2008