back to article 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 …

COMMENTS

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  1. Mikel

    Tape?

    It is difficult for me to appreciate the reasons why we are still talking about tape. Or even imagine it.

    1. James Gosling
      Facepalm

      Re: Tape?

      "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.

      1. Chris Parsons Silver badge

        Re: Tape?

        For a small business with a server, tape is great for managing off-site backup, it's quick and you can take a cartridge home with you in your bag. Don't knock it until you've tried it.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Tape?

      Comments on articles like this are always a useful barometer of commentor's actual experience within IT and if they've ever been near a proper business.

      Just sayin'

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Tape?

      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.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    So..

    What happened to the $100m EMC loaned Quantum back in 2009?

  3. flobadob

    Support the devs

    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 ;)

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Support the devs

      It sounds like you actually want an archiving product to write programs against, rather than the actual API.

      You could also do worse than looking at LTFS, it may be of use to you.

  4. John Smith 19 Gold badge
    Boffin

    Let me suggest it's something to do with cost per bit.

    Which I suspect is a *lot* lower than either disk or solid state.

    And of course the little issue of how many parts of a hard drive *must* work to allow data recovery. IOW how few have to fail to render it a *major* data recovery task.

  5. NothingFancy

    EMC Select

    the Select program has only been around since 2004, so not sure how Quantum could be tops in 2002 and 2003

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