Tape is sexy again - so why can't Quantum stop drowning? Quantum's share price is dropping, dropping and dropping, despite positive product announcements and a general swing in opinion about tape storage products. So what lies behind its loss of 62 per cent of share value and market capitalisation in nine months? We hear that, at EMC World in May 2011, the infamous "Tape Sucks" EMC …
"It is difficult for me to appreciate the reasons why we are still talking about tape. Or even imagine it."
Because business large and small predominantly use tape for backups and data storage. This idea some people seem to have that tape is slow and/or inefficient reflects their basic lack of understanding of the technology.
That is not to say I don't foresee a time when we no longer use tape, but we are still quite some way off that.
Price, low energy usage, huge capacity, ease of moving data off-site... price. Many reasons to use tape for data you are almost certain will never need to be used again, but want to hold onto for archiving purposes. It makes much more sense than keeping relatively costly disks spinning 24/7 for data that people will almost certain not use.
If there was a better tape API available that was easy to use, then tapes would be popular. It's just too tricky to write software to use tapes. The API you get with windows works but some functions will work with some devices and others don't. It's kinda like programming DirectX! The API is also too low level - we need something that gives us easy access to removable/serial media which has a higher level layer we can write applications with. Something which can give us an index of the files on tape easily too. I guess people like symantec have these APIs but they cost money ;)
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