Tape Vendors say "We're not dead, yet"

Longtime tape vendors Overland Storage and Tandberg Data are
going all in as the poker players say on a transition from tape automation
vendors to providers of disk backup, and in the case of Overland, NAS
systems.  Both vendors made a good living
in the 80s and 90s selling tape drives and libraries to the SMB and SME markets
and have had trouble adapting since.

Last week I spoke to Overland about their new CDP/Disaster
Recovery appliances Tandberg about their DPS1000 VTLs and the future of the
company as a disk backup player.  The
DPS1000 VTL runs software from Crossroads, of storage router fame, creating an
iSCSI VTL with data compression and direct tape export but lacking heavy duty
data deduplication all for an MSRP of $10K for 3TB or 18K for 6TB and
expandable to 37TB (all net after RAID overhead) the DPS1000 might be a good
solution for an SME.

On the other hand I'm not convinced an iSCSI VTL is the
right solution in an era where just about every backup application supports
does data deduplication to disk targets. After all rather than spend $18K for a
DPS1000 you can buy an Infortrend iSCSI array with 8 1TB drives for $6000 and
get several times the effective capacity.

Tandberg is also, along with Imation, an OEM of Prostor's
RDX removable disk technology that wraps a laptop SATA drive in a hermetically
sealed plastic case for ESD and shock protection. This protection, plus the
soft loading USB or SATA dock and driver that makes RDX cartridges removable
storage that backup applications can track and ask for, makes RDX a much better
solution than the USB drives many SMBs use for backup