After an absence of five or six years, and two generations, DDS trademark owner Sony is rejoining HP in supporting the seventh generation of DDS/DAT drives, DAT320, targeted at the SMB market. DAT320, like HP's DAT160s, abandons the Digital Auto Tape cartridge, and its 4-mm-wide tape, using 8-mm tape in a two reel cartridge instead.

Howard Marks, Network Computing Blogger

July 23, 2008

2 Min Read

After an absence of five or six years, and two generations, DDS trademark owner Sony is rejoining HP in supporting the seventh generation of DDS/DAT drives, DAT320, targeted at the SMB market. DAT320, like HP's DAT160s, abandons the Digital Auto Tape cartridge, and its 4-mm-wide tape, using 8-mm tape in a two reel cartridge instead.My biggest problem with DAT320 is that I don't think the SMB customer with one server should be backing up to tape. I've seen too many SMBs fail at making a good backup every day, and getting one off-site occasionally, with a tape drive. They don't change tapes, don't notice when the backup program fails, don't take tapes off-site and, since they're not IT professionals, generally don't understand how backups work and don't care to know till something goes wrong. A combination of a local backup to a USB hard drive and an online backup makes more sense to me for these folks.

The real question to me is, do we need a tape format specifically for low-end use? Even if you disagree with me and think SMBs can handle tapes effectively, why have tape formats specifically for the low end? Why can't SMBs use earlier generations of LTO? I just opened the CDW site to see what the street prices for SMB backup devices really are and right there on the front page are an HP DAT160 drive for $849 and a Tandberg LTO-2 drive for $760. Paying more for a drive that has less capacity (200 native GB/tape vs. 80 for DAT160) and no automation upgrade doesn't make any sense to me. Unlike DAT160 drives which can mount and read DDS-4 tapes, the new DAT320 drives are only backwards compatible with DAT160, so there aren't many organizations that will get any real benefit from backwards compatibility.

About the Author(s)

Howard Marks

Network Computing Blogger

Howard Marks is founder and chief scientist at Deepstorage LLC, a storage consultancy and independent test lab based in Santa Fe, N.M. and concentrating on storage and data center networking. In more than 25 years of consulting, Marks has designed and implemented storage systems, networks, management systems and Internet strategies at organizations including American Express, J.P. Morgan, Borden Foods, U.S. Tobacco, BBDO Worldwide, Foxwoods Resort Casino and the State University of New York at Purchase. The testing at DeepStorage Labs is informed by that real world experience.

He has been a frequent contributor to Network Computing and InformationWeek since 1999 and a speaker at industry conferences including Comnet, PC Expo, Interop and Microsoft's TechEd since 1990. He is the author of Networking Windows and co-author of Windows NT Unleashed (Sams).

He is co-host, with Ray Lucchesi of the monthly Greybeards on Storage podcast where the voices of experience discuss the latest issues in the storage world with industry leaders.  You can find the podcast at: http://www.deepstorage.net/NEW/GBoS

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