DAT media - forever green
June 2008
Anyone who believes that tape has had its day hasn't taken a look at the tape media market for a while. The total capacity of storage shipped on DAT, LTO, DLT and SDLT tape media has increased quarter-on-quarter for over five years. Based on media shipment figures from Santa Clara Consulting Group (SCCG), multiplied by native media capacities we can see that between Q3 2002 and Q1'08 the industry had shipped well over 2,000 PB of potential data storage capacity, as you can see in chart A below. That's the equivalent of 100 million trees made into paper and printed±. So much for the imminent demise of tape.
± According to data from the American Forest and Paper Foundation (AFPA)
The data from SCCG reports that more than 11 million tape cartridges were sold in Q1'08 as customers continue to transition to higher capacity cartridges to store ever increasing volume of data.
Let's face it, even the wealthiest of companies would struggle to justify the cost of preserving their entire content store on disk arrays and hard drives. Tape is still the most cost effective all-round solution for archiving business information. The material itself is cheap to produce and, critically in a more environmentally aware era, less expensive in terms of the management, power and energy required to preserve the data in archive.
According to analysts IDC, today's tape industry is worth more than $4 billion, and with over 18 million DAT drives and close to 500 million pieces of DAT media shipped since launch in 1989, DAT continues to play its part in this market.
In Q1 2008 over 2.6 million DAT cartridges were sold, accounting for 23% of overall tape cartridge volume and 77% of low-end tape media sales, as shown in the pie chart below, Chart B.
DAT media unit sales were up by over 5% between Q4'07 and Q1'08, with DAT160 cartridges gaining traction and accounting for 8% share. SCCG expects this DAT 160 media growth to continue by around 36% quarter on quarter in Q2'08. DAT72 sales also remain strong and accounted for 35% of volume.
HP had the largest market share of the DAT media market with 53.37% of DDS cartridges. It was followed by Sony (17.67%) and Imation (9.60%).
June 2008
Anyone who believes that tape has had its day hasn't taken a look at the tape media market for a while. The total capacity of storage shipped on DAT, LTO, DLT and SDLT tape media has increased quarter-on-quarter for over five years. Based on media shipment figures from Santa Clara Consulting Group (SCCG), multiplied by native media capacities we can see that between Q3 2002 and Q1'08 the industry had shipped well over 2,000 PB of potential data storage capacity, as you can see in chart A below. That's the equivalent of 100 million trees made into paper and printed±. So much for the imminent demise of tape.
± According to data from the American Forest and Paper Foundation (AFPA)
The data from SCCG reports that more than 11 million tape cartridges were sold in Q1'08 as customers continue to transition to higher capacity cartridges to store ever increasing volume of data.
Let's face it, even the wealthiest of companies would struggle to justify the cost of preserving their entire content store on disk arrays and hard drives. Tape is still the most cost effective all-round solution for archiving business information. The material itself is cheap to produce and, critically in a more environmentally aware era, less expensive in terms of the management, power and energy required to preserve the data in archive.
According to analysts IDC, today's tape industry is worth more than $4 billion, and with over 18 million DAT drives and close to 500 million pieces of DAT media shipped since launch in 1989, DAT continues to play its part in this market.
In Q1 2008 over 2.6 million DAT cartridges were sold, accounting for 23% of overall tape cartridge volume and 77% of low-end tape media sales, as shown in the pie chart below, Chart B.
DAT media unit sales were up by over 5% between Q4'07 and Q1'08, with DAT160 cartridges gaining traction and accounting for 8% share. SCCG expects this DAT 160 media growth to continue by around 36% quarter on quarter in Q2'08. DAT72 sales also remain strong and accounted for 35% of volume.
HP had the largest market share of the DAT media market with 53.37% of DDS cartridges. It was followed by Sony (17.67%) and Imation (9.60%).
Users in the SMB Market place value on technologies and vendors that have staying power.