DLT Tape

DLT/DDS users everywhere are stepping up to VXA Packet Technology and replacing their aging tape drives with VXA's greater capacity, speed and better overall TCO.

In the small-to-medium business and departmental markets, DLT / DDS has been the category leader for the past fifteen years. Why? The tape drive costs have been low (generally under $1,000) and the tape cost has been low (about $10-$25 per tape cartridge).

But DLT/DDS users have made steep concessions to enjoy low prices: capacity (20GB to 36GB) has not kept pace with market needs, speed has suffered (3MB/s, 10GB/h max.), and because of old fashioned track-based technology and head-to-tape alignment issues, media error rates have been high and restore dependability has been much lower than expected.

New generations of DLT/DDS continue to lag! The fifth generation DDS product, DAT72, with 36GB native capacity does not offer enough capacity to backup today's average server hard drives. Compounding the capacity problem is the fact that fifth generation DDS offers no increase in data transfer rates, staying at only 3MB per second.

In order to repeatedly increase capacity in a fifteen year old format, manufacturers of DLT/DDS drives have been forced to dramatically reduce tolerances and tighten tape specifications. For instance, DDS-4 and DAT-72 drum rotation speeds have increased to 10,000 rpm, requiring that a precise cushion of air be maintained between the head and the tape surface to prevent abrasive wear.

Because of limitations in the DLT/DDS specification, Sony announced in April of 2001 that it would no longer advance the DDS format, citing future scalability issues. With DLT/DDS technology at its final generation, and the unavoidable reliability issues resulting from repeatedly upgrading a fifteen-year-old technology standard, many DDS users are seeking a new, more reliable format. It's time to say goodbye to DLT/DDS and move to a new, better standard.

Why VXA Packet Technology Is Superior to DDS/DLT

With four times the capacity of DDS-4 tapes, twice the data transfer rate, and several orders of magnitude higher reliability, VXA Packet Tape drives and autoloaders from Tandberg Data offer DLT/DDS users a significant upgrade in capacity, performance, and dependability.

How is this possible? VXA Packet Technology is simply a better, more efficient way to store and retrieve data. VXA Packet Tape technology is nothing short of a revolution in data recording and retrieval. Prior to the introduction of VXA Packet Technology, the fundamental architecture and format of tape drives had not changed in more than twenty years. View this short multimedia tour

Rather than reading and writing data in a diagonal tracks spanning the width of the tape, the technique utilized by older tape technologies such as DLT/DDS, Tandberg Data's VXA-172 Packet Tape Drive reads and writes small, individually addressed packets, similar to the method used to transmit data over the Internet. Tape drives that read and write in constant diagonal tracks require very tight mechanical tolerances to maintain perfect alignment of the tape with the read-write heads.

Because the VXA Packet Drive reads and writes individual packets rather than a continuous stream, the manufacturing tolerances are 180 times greater than competing tape technologies. VXA Packet Technology's greater tolerance directly translates into many substantial benefits, including competitive drive costs, competitive tape cartridge costs, greater usage life of tape cartridges, and greater data reliability.