Quantum taps tape drive market after three-year gap

Venkatesh Ganesh / Mumbai

Alex Tan

Quantum Corporation has announced the launch of SDLT 600 tape drives in India. After a hiatus of three years, Quantum is back on Indian shores with its SDLT tape drives and a new strategy to penetrate the Indian data protection market. The SDLT 600 offers double the capacity of its earlier version (SDLT 320) with a 20 percent increase in price.

Despite a fall in the share of tape in the overall storage pie (due to rising capacity and other alternatives), Quantum has been eyeing the Indian market with great interest. Says Alex Tan, director OEM Business, Quantum Corporation, “India is the second largest market for tape drives and Quantum accounts for approximately 18 percent of the entire APAC market. We see a huge potential and at present we see the DLT market is approximately 35 percent of the Indian tape drive segment.”

A recent study undertaken by Millward Brown Intelliquest shows a preference for DLT Tape technology over the nearest competing technology format.

Existing customers who have invested in Quantum’s DLT tape technology can leverage their value on investment by upgrading to the new, backward-read compatible tape drives. Besides, it reduces customers’ back-up windows as well as provides superior file retrieval time for content archiving applications. Enhancing the automation environment, all SDLT 600 tape drives include the built-in intelligence of DLTSage, a suite of predictive diagnostic and management tools designed to help ensure that data back-ups are completed successfully and both drives and media can be properly managed by IT administrators to prevent system outages.

There are some inherent advantages of using disc-based backup solutions as compared to writing on tape.” In the case of tape, sometimes a back-up fails, but with disc back-up reliability is approximately to the tune of 95 percent and realises 30 percent of overall cost efficiency,” said Alex Tan.

The company has identified some segments that can drive growth in the Indian market. An area of interest to Quantum is the Indian film industry. “We can address the needs of the film industry, especially editing suites for digitising and other back-up related work,” said Tan. Another segment of interest to Quantum is the burgeoning online gaming space and they are already in talks with a couple of players.

The company has chosen Ingram Micro as its national distributor for SDLT products and simultaneously is in the process of strengthening its channel presence in India.