Features - Storage Innovations:

EXABYTE ANNOUNCES NEW VXA 'X TAPE'

Exabyte Corp announced the new VXA Packet X Tapes, the industry's only tape cartridges with three different cartridge capacities. The X Tape family of VXA cartridges, which includes 20, 40, and 80 GB capacities (native), offers even greater reliability and lower pricing. VXA X Tape cost is now comparable to DDS, the aging format with the largest install base of any tape drive platform. Today's announcement puts Exabyte's VXA on a clear path to take significant market share from the older format, allowing users to easily step up to the higher capacity, faster transfer speed, and greater reliability of VXA.

"The strong market acceptance of the VXA product line has increased sales volume. Greater volume has led to efficiencies of scale, resulting in reduced media pricing, and we're passing these savings on to our customers," explained Kieran Maloney, general manager of Exabyte's VXA Business Unit. "Exabyte's award-winning VXA Packet drives, autoloaders and tapes have always provided far superior restore integrity, greater capacity and faster transfer speeds than DDS. These benefits, the industry's only tape drive with three different cartridge capacities, and X Tape's reduced pricing make VXA the smartest choice for IT managers who want to step up to the new standard in tape back up for the SMB and departmental markets."

VXA's volume increases and production efficiencies not only resulted in reduced media pricing, but also led to advancements to the overall cartridge technology. "VXA X Tapes are even more reliable than previous generations due to tighter specifications, which further reduce variations from one cartridge to another," said Bob Ariniello, vice president of Exabyte's Customer Unit. "To further protect our customers' investment, VXA X Tapes are engineered for compatibility with the next generation, VXA-3, scheduled for mid 2005, which will offer double the capacity and speed of VXA-2."

"VXA targets the large SMB and departmental market segment that seek reliable data backup and restore with the greatest data capacity for the price," said Dianne McAdam, senior analyst at Data Mobility Group. "With its new robust X Tape and its lower cost, VXA now competes favorably with other technologies, such as DDS and DAT 72, in total cost of ownership while offering a technology that has proven its value in terms of overall performance."

Background: The Issues with DDS

DDS, the current standard in the $3.2 billion tape drive market, has not kept pace with the market. The fifth generation DDS product, called DAT72, with 36 GB native capacity does not offer enough capacity to backup today's average server hard drives. Compounding the capacity problem is the fact that fifth generation DDS offers no increase in data transfer rate, staying at only 3MB per second.

"DDS doesn't have enough capacity to handle the typical backups that our customers are doing today," explained Stephen Hemsworth of HemTech, a New York-based VAR that specializes in storage solutions. "We need a tape solution with more capacity and more speed, and VXA is our new standard."

Those familiar with the old DDS technology also cite another critical issue. "We've seen a lot of data integrity problems with DDS," adds Hemsworth. "That's no fun for the end user or a VAR supporting them. With the well-known media errors associated with DDS technology, it is no wonder OEMs and VARs are seeking a new standard. That's why Sony has abandoned support for the technology."

For more than a decade, the DDS format has secured the largest install base, shipping on average one million units per year. But the format's capacity and speed have not kept pace with market demands. "The announcement of X Tape marks the first time that a tape manufacturer has delivered to market both tape hardware and tape cartridges with price points comparable to DDS," said Kerry Brock, vice president of marketing at Exabyte. "With new VXA X Tape pricing and the well-documented performance of VXA drives and autoloaders, VXA is the only tape format poised to take a large piece of DDS market share by targeting users who are replacing and upgrading their aging DDS tape systems."