Storage Newsletter reports that Tape Drive and Media Revenues Decreased by 25% in 2009. The data comes from a report by the Santa Clara Consulting Group.
The numbers show us how old tape formats die: slowly. While the overall market for drives and media was $1.58B it was split among LTO, DLT, DAT, 8mm and even, gasp, QIC.
The good news: drive sales were $629M, suggesting that media sales will continue for years to come. LTO had over 83% of drive sales – $534M – with DAT (!) drives making most of the rest – $69M – and DLT much of the remainder.
The media numbers are revealing. Overall, media sales were only about 50% greater than drive sales or $955M. But in the case of DAT, media sales of $45M were less than drive sales. Buyers aren’t making much use of their new drives.
8 mm and QIC bring up the rear. Somebody bought over a million units of AIT media and over $16M of QIC media.
The StorageMojo take
The long tail of tape is longer than I’d thought. There must be ancient systems out in retail or OEM equipment that use the media. Military, too.
But why that 25% drop in the overall tape market? I’d need more time series data to draw any firm conclusions, but here’s what I’d look at:
- The Great Recession. The overall slowing in business and capital expenditures is a piece of that. But the world economy did not decline 25%, thank goodness, so that can’t be the full cause.
- D2D. Data de-duplication is aimed at making disk competitive with tape. Looks like 2009 was the year it took a byte out of tape.
- Tape capacity growth. The LTO folks have been increasing LTO tape capacity at a rate near that of disk. More data, fewer tapes. Disks, of course, wear out, so the replacement market is huge.
- Drive cost. At $3-$4k for an LTO 5 drive and $125 per 3 TB tape, the use of tape is moving upmarket, which means smaller volumes.
Some people love what tape does. But others don’t: I haven’t seen a new tape or disk-based camcorder introduced in over a year. Everyone is going to flash.
$1.5B markets don’t die overnight – even dropping 25% a year. Tape will be around for a long time to come.
Courteous comments welcome, of course. I kicked off DLT for DEC back in 1991 and have always wondered why Quantum just rolled over for LTO instead of fighting. Oh well.
It’s hard to replace the backup provided by tape; though as you suggest above, the cost vs disk backup makes tape more and more of an enterprise level tool.
For the Quantum and DLT; having first hand experience there, I’d say there were multiple years of mismanagement determined to get a product out at an unrealistic time schedule thereby sacrificing quality. The 320 was released way too early, the 600 was a disaster, and the 1200 was never given a chance. Much of middle management became afraid to tell upper management how bad it was as not making a target date was unacceptable; ~5 VPs of engineering in ~3yrs does not make for a good consistent product. There was also a huge pressure to show short term profits or gains in the books which sacrificed a lot of long term potential.
Outside of the company – the merger of HP and Compaq put the situation into a serious tailspin as almost overnight one of the major consumers of DLT went away.
The final nail was the merger of Quantum and ADIC which resulted in a company debt much greater than the combined companies income even at a 2x market share; though I’m pretty certain the death of DLT was already planed before or part of the ADIC merger as the only way to make the combined companies stable was for a massive reduction in liabilities.
I used to fix most of them back in early 80’s. I architect large backup and archive infrastructure for years at STK and Sun.
I still love tape where they fit. Archive is one of them. Backup certainly too but disk in between to help streaming tape. Streaming tape drive is too complicated with their native speed and number of them. Disk cannot sustain tape speed today. With a dozen of recent tape drives (>120MB/sec each) you can kill just about any disk arrays speed at much cheaper price than VTL or dedup hardware.
All hardware technologies that was supposed to replace tape over the years it is fun to see them dying before tape. VTL is one example. Very few deploy VTL or dedup hardware today. Most of them use cheap modular disk buffer combine with dedup software with tape for archive and offsite backup.
With storage scaling faster than backup time can handle, archive and delete data will be the next trend soon or later. Symantec promote this method now.
Not new. Mainframe is still ahead on this concept too. Look like the clock is going backward again with “suppose to be” open systems…none of they are…
We’re getting killed by backup-for-disaster-recovery cost and performance, so once again I sat down to run the numbers on LTO-4, versus D2D over WAN, versus removable/raw 1 TB or 2 TB SATA drives, for backing up a few hundred terabytes of storage.
LTO-4 won again. Easily.
Insert obligatory reference to Tanenbaum, station wagons, and tapes here.
Tape won’t go away soon. But I sure wish there were something bigger, faster, and cheaper. Especially bigger.
LTO vs DLT vs SAIT vs 8 MM vs 9-track vs 7-track …
Bought them all, often multiple generations, mostly chasing the biggest tape capacity available in drives under $20K.
LTO “winning” brought one big benefit and one big loss:
Benefit – We’re slowly standardizing on a family of drives with some forward and backward compatibility. Don’t need to keep as many dusty drives in store rooms just in case we need to read an old tape.
Loss – No competition to push capacity and performance. Colorful diagrams on consortium and vendor web sites show future LTO capacity/performance roadmaps. Five years ago those roadmaps had somewhat optimistic dates like “Q1 2010”. Not any more.
Now the attitude appears to be “we’ll release the next generation after we’ve fully milked the current generation.”
Robin: I’m glad to hear you say this – I suppose I don’t have the “mojo” you have in this broader space (yet), but I’ve been saying this for years – Tape is NOT dead. Tape was allegedly died in 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, etc.
Mark Twain and Tape have something in common.
“The report of my death was an exaggeration”
Mark Twain said it and Tape is undoubtedly storing it.
As for Ben’s comments on Quantum, I don’t believe he has all the facts. When the two companies merged the debt at the time didn’t exceed the companies combined value (read the press releases), which was $1.2B at the time of the merger.
As for Tape, if you look at where Tape sat in the late 80’s, most would say “Tape is King of Backup, all hail the King”. However, if you remember (and I have no doubt that you do) when disk was introduced in the backup eco-systems in the early to late 90’s it was not to replace tape, but to increase the performance and reliability of the tape backup system we were employing at the time. Tape was still King. The challenge of disk in the backup stream meant that it had to match, 1:1, the original data you were protecting AND in order to have the NEXT backup be successful you needed to move that backup data from disk to tape.
What was the original problem we were trying to solve? You got it, to increase performance and reliability of our tape backup system.
So now if we are unable to meet the “draining of the disk to tape” window so we can have it available for the next day’s backup, our backups would fail.
Solution #2, buy 2x the amount of disk for backup so you can at least get last night’s backup off to tape and removed from disk before day three rolls around, but what if…
and so on, and so on, and so on.
Disk never could replace tape it was originally meant to augment tape – and I argue that it still augments tape today but with greater efficiencies.
So to your point, is tape really dieing? Or are we seeing the most efficient use of technologies in highest yield use case. Efficient Disk Targets and High Capacity/Speed Tape Storage for long term offsite or nearsite storage.
I will argue the latter. Until someone can show me a disk that can stay on a shelf and be reliably fired up 7 years later to do an audit recovery, tape will remain strong and existent.
Will Flash become the new tape? Perhaps, but there was talk 6 years ago that holographic storage would/could be the new tape too. I do think Flash has a better chance of becoming a longer term storage medium, but we’re still a long way out in my humble opinion.
-backuphype
At Networld interop this year our classic “tapesucks.com” booth was on display directly behind the Staples Office supply booth. The rep came around the corner and said “I keep reading tape is dead..tape sucks. If tape is so dead how come do we sell more tapes every year?” I shrugged and acknowledged I had no idea and that anyone selling more stuff in the tape environment was news to me. All I can figure is maybe they’re capturing a larger share of the shrinking market.
The big husky Sony Digibeta tape is World standard for delivery of movies to overses markets. There’s some movement toward HDSR tape in these markets. Big, big money there. With tape, obviously, you don’t just click your mouse and steal someone’s work. Tape delivery there will not fade until the security of other delivery means is well assured.
“Until someone can show me a disk that can stay on a shelf and be reliably fired up 7 years later to do an audit recovery, tape will remain strong and existent. ” -backuphype
I occasionally hear this argument and am baffled where it comes from. I can and I have fired up drives 7 years later. I find the failure rate no higher than 7 year old tape (or 1 month old tape for that matter). I counter this argument by asking who has the same tape drive they had 7 years ago and are drivers still made for it on the modern OS? I’ve dug through the literature trying to find an authoritative source that confirms that tape has a better shelf life than disk. So far I’ve seen tape vendors make this claim without backing it up. Since both tape and HD media hold magnetically flipped bits, I can’t imagine why there should be much difference. In fact, since Hard drives are sealed better, I believe they have the advantage. I’ve found articles bragging that old audio tapes in museums can still be played but I find that fact unimpressive. While it’s true that I can find no major hard drive vendor who will commit to a “shelf life” I tend to believe that’s more a function of corporate liability protection than engineering. So backuphype if you have science that backs up your claimed 7 year shelf life for tape and documents why tape shelf life is superior to hard drives I’d love to see it.
Rex – you’re right. For now LTO-4 is hard to beat on pure price per TB. But it is also a generation back. LTO-5 tapes run $110 each and have 1.5TB native capacity. 1.5TB raw drive is $95. You DID say you wanted something bigger than LTO-4 …and at this next size up raw drives are competitive. And…. to paraphrase the Visa commercial: LTO-4 tape: $29 dollars. Being able to restore quickly and easily when the server goes down: Priceless
Darren:
Well, I have to admit I’m a “tape dude” from years ago and years ago, you’d never leave disk on a shelf and expect to spin it up 7 years later.
As for your comment on “who has the same tape drive they had 7 years ago” – well, if they have LTO tape drives, I believe they can still write one gen back and read two gen back. So I think they’d still have it around.
Nonetheless, the point is around the HD shelf life and the costs. I personally have a HD that I haven’t touched in 2 1/2 years. Tried to spin it up last week and it wouldn’t work. However, a QIC tape that I had from 1998 that I just discovered in a box that was stored in an “un-air conditioned” storage unit for 7 years beyond sitting in my office before I relocated, was fired up in the QIC drive that was in the same cardboard box and I was able to read the data – all of it. I’ll admit the stuff on the tape was crap – didn’t need it, but I was able to pull it off.
I won’t challenge your test though, you’re in the business of knowing your disk drives and sub systems. I will begin using my “google skills” and see what I can come up with that is better than the two of us running our own non-scientific tests.
Thanks..you’ve really given me something think about and research.
-backuphype
Tape simply isn’t going anywhere. It’s the most conservative, tried, tested and trusted storage platform period. It’s been how many years now with all the predictions and counter predictions. What we’re missing here is that while all the other platforms have been struggling through highs and lows, tape has been continually delivering while increasing capacity. Lets leave this battle alone and simply focus on the strenghts of each storage platforms and the value they deliver in solving storage problems.
Alani Kuye
Why tape? Still orders of magnitude better per bit reliability than disk when in operation. Still cheaper per bit. Tape is an “offline” media, it takes an ordered series of steps to access data- using “online” media like disk allows a malfunction direct access to delete all data (it HAS happened!). Longetivity of archive- archive to disk and you will spend 6 months out of every 2-3 years migrating your data from the previous disk system to a new one. The longetivity of tape drives means that media is still being bought.
“…a 30-year lifetime, media reuse across tape technology improvements, and one or more orders of magnitude reduced
bit error rates”
“Media reuse saves the DOE sites millions of dollars in operating costs for archival storage.”
“It takes years to migrate Petabytes of data off old technology onto new simply because the performance is constrained to the peak read rates of the older devices. With a three to five year
technology refresh cycle, data would nearly constantly be in motion or data would be retained on media with an exceptionally high failure rate.”
“Tape is and will remain the dominant archival storage medium”
US DOE Extreme Scale Workshop, “HPSS in the Extreme Scale Era”
LLNL, Sandia, LBNL, Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, NNSA