August 28, 2000

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Digital Tape Technology Scales Upward

Agreement between Benchmark and Quantum aims to push digital linear tape to more users

By Martin J. Garvey

More on tape storage:

Closing The Storage Gap (7/3/00) On The Horizon: Standards Take Shape Slowly (7/3/00)

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single tape technology that can be used for data backup in workgroups or across a company will result from an agreement sealed last week between Benchmark Tape Systems Corp. and Quantum Corp. Until now, the 1.4 million digital linear tape drives and more than 45 million DLTtape media cartridges shipped by Quantum were only for the midrange computing market.

As part of the agreement, Quantum's high-end Super DLTtape drives, to be shipped next month, will read media written by Benchmark's workgroup-level DLT1 tape drive. DLT1 provides 40 Gbytes of capacity and has a transfer rate of 3 Mbytes per second.

Quantum brings three Super DLTtape drives to the deal: an 80-Gbyte unit with an 8 Mbytes per second transfer rate, a 110-Gbyte drive with an 11 Mbytes per second transfer rate, and a 110-Gbyte drive with a transfer rate of 16 Mbytes per second.

Quantum partnered with Benchmark because "there are different product requirements and approaches for each market," says Philip Treite, Quantum's manager of product marketing. Quantum is the digital linear tape drive market leader, with 82% of the market. "Benchmark has done a good job driving DLT tape down to the lowest ends of the market," Treite says.

"Customers want to see interchangeability, buy into DLT, and push it into the workgroup or the high-end market," says Steve Berens, executive director of marketing for Benchmark.

The Super DLTtape drives will compete against the new Linear Tape Open tape standard touted by Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Seagate. LTO tape has a transfer rate of 15 Mbytes per second. Gartner Group analyst Fara Yale says Quantum's advantages include "its large installed base, and many vendors have adopted DLT in their tape portfolios."

The Benchmark drive is $1,499. The Super DLTtape drives are priced at around $8,000.

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