back to article Double trouble at tape survivor Quantum as CEO and CFO quit firm

Scale-out storage firm Quantum has announced that CEO Patrick Dennis is stepping down to focus on family matters. CFO Fuad Ahmad has also left. Michael Dodson has joined as new CFO and interim CEO effective today. Quantum's board is now actively searching for a permanent CEO. To hire a CFO then lose the new CEO who hired him …

  1. Peter2 Silver badge

    CEO brought in to reduce costs.

    CEO discovers that he can't greatly reduce costs.

    CEO leaves because he doesn't see any acheivable way to improve the business he wants to spend more time with his family.

    It's hardly a surprise though. On the plus side, tape is really excellent for off site backups and low end long term archiving by throwing a tape every month in a safe location.

    On the downside it's an ass to setup if you haven't done it before (which many people haven't as they are going to the cloud for backups) and expensive to boot as you need a server that supports SCSI before you even start about thinking about buying the tape drive which puts a lot of people off.

    There are only a couple of options for the tape companies. Consolidate, or just pray your the last one in the market standing to keep a smaller market.

    That, or try and do something like get companies back from archive companies by doing a counterattack to get some market share back. Make a tape appliance attached to a NAS that's foolproof to deploy and do a hire purchase on it to bring the monthly cost down to around the same as online backup companies charge, and market it on being cheaper, with a faster recovery time.

    1. 2Nick3

      The likely last man standing in the tape drive/library world will be IBM. They're going to be able to tolerate margins that no one else can, and they're so entrenched at customers using tape that getting someone to switch away from them would be a near-impossible battle.

      1. J. Cook Silver badge

        Their TS line also Just Works(tm) Our old iSeries (an old POWER5 based bucket) had a TS3100 on it for.... 6? 7? years, and we transferred it (after swapping the SCSI drive for a SAS drive!) to a newer POWER server running iSeries. it was the daily driver for the iSeries until we decided to merge it's backups in with the rest of the enterprise, and it never had a major fault.

        I can also state with some authority that Dell's Powervault TL line are re-badged IBM TS units, and we've gone through a total of three TL4000 units in the 12 years I've been here; our windows backups are MUCH harder on the libraries. (and I'm looking to replace it with a TS4300 with expansion cabinet, seeing as we are keeping tape around as an archive for monthly and yearly backups at this point.)

        1. Solmyr ibn Wali Barad

          "I can also state with some authority that Dell's Powervault TL line are re-badged IBM TS units"

          Sort of. It's a German company called BDT that supplies both Dell and IBM (TS3100/TS3200 models) with lower end tape libraries. Same design was also sold as Oracle SL24/SL48 until Oracle replaced them with indigeneous SL150. HP MSL2024/48 are also OEM'd from BDT.

          To briefly touch the article, Quantum/ADIC designs are actually quite popular in the midrange market. IBM TS3310 was definitely one of those. Not sure about TS4300, haven't seen it in the wild yet.

          High end libraries are usually not OEM'd. IBM TS3500/TS4500, Oracle SL3000/SL4000/SL8500, HP ESL are all original designs. And fascinating beasts they are too.

    2. J. Cook Silver badge
      Coffee/keyboard

      Well... sort of.

      While tape is it's own beast, it's down to SAS and fiber channel at this point; both require external facing adapters, which run about the same price, oddly enough.

      Another part of the problem is that the fancy-pants 'converged' FCoE adapters do not speak FC-TAPE very well (if at all), although that could have been a configuration problem; I got tired of dicking around with it for two months and slapped a dual port brocade card in and got the bloody thing running five minutes afterwards.

      I'd love to see a hybrid appliance that is idiot proof for people who've never used tape (or enterprise grade backup systems) to get up to speed and running in a good way, but can scale out as the company grows by way of jacking in an additional shelf o disk and/or tape as needs warrant.

      (my fan fiction fever dream pairing for this would be a Nimble-style array and the TS4300 product line or something that operates in a similar manner. but then, my dreams are... strange.)

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Quantum wont die because just like IBM has kept Mainframe around there is a need for tape in industries like media. Also companies that want to control their data versus using Cloud storage. They will be a cheaper alternative to IBM.

    However they will continue to see shrinkage in the marketplace and will have to reduce staff. They could eventually sell off to a Chinese company.

  3. 89724102371719511892724I9755670349743096734346773478647852349863592355648544996313855148583659264921

    Quantum Fireball

    1. Fatman

      RE: Quantum Fireball

      I had one of those once back in the late 90's. (https://www.cnet.com/products/quantum-fireball-540-1080-hard-drive-545-mb-fast-scsi/specs/)

      I used it to replace a 10 year old Micropolis that locked up.

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