Exabyte Corporation , a tape backup systems vendor, announced today its new market strategy and tape drive roadmap in the midrange tape storage solutions market. The company said it will focus on two primary markets: The high-density 8mm and LTO automation market, and the DDS replacement market.
Exabyte said it will offer solutions to the high-density 8mm automation market through its MammothTape and VXA’s products. In addition to high-density 8mm automation, Exabyte also plans to focus on delivering automation products integrated with Linear Tape-Open (LTO) tape drives. It said these products will be offered in rack mountable solutions with native Fibre Channel connectivity.
The company said its new Mammoth-3 product will offer a compressed capacity of 625 GB and a compressed transfer rate of 60 MB/sec. The drive will be available in two versions; one priced under $3,000 with backward-read compatibility to VXA products, and another with additional backward-read compatibility to the previous generation Mammoth drive.
According to Exabyte, the DDS replacement market was created when limitations inherent to DDS (DAT) technology prevented DDS manufacturers Hewlett-Packard, Sony and Seagate from developing a next-generation product, leaving DDS users in need of a next-generation tape storage solution. Exabyte said it believes VXA products are the ideal replacement for DDS technology because they are recognized for their proven reliability and provide capacities that exceed DDS requirements.
The next-generation of Exabyte’s DDS replacement technology, VXA-2, is slated to be generally available in mid 2002. The company said the VXA-2 tape drive will offer a compressed capacity of 160 GB, and a compressed transfer rate of 12 MB/sec.