Are DATs becoming obsolete

[Omar Sharif Chaudhry]

Hi,
I hv heard it that DAT technology is on its way out and AIT (Advanced Intelligent Tape) solutions are the new things, and in this respect SLR-7 is being offered as a solution.
Is this correct?
Pls comment.

[harry d brown jr]

I guess it depends on how you define "becoming". I would imagine that someday they will be obsolete, but as of today and tomorrow they aren't. I'm sure we will see a DDS5 drive soon, so I would again imagine that they will be supported for another 5 years. Look at how long 9track tapes hung on: over 30 years!

I wouldn't worry about it, because we will always have a "product of the week". It doesn't really matter what the industry creates, it is what are consumers buying that drives the market place. If it were the other way around, we'd be buying new technology by the minute.

Think about how many DAT tape drives there are out there, my company has over 1200, and I'm sure tapes and drives will be available for some time to come.

live free or die
harry

[madoc]

Well.

With regard to DAT, HP probably won't be doing a DDS5 drive (but that's just us).

However, there is no need to panic just yet as the current DDS3 and DDS4 drives have long manufacturing life still before them AND then another 3 years of support life.

Incidentally, did you notice that we just discontinued our DAT8 that started back in 1996 ?? That has another 5 years of support life in front of it.

As to technology replacments ... well take a look at the HP LTO technology

cheers,

John

[Vincent Farrugia]

Hello,

The short answer is not yet. DDS3 and DDS4 are still being manufactured, so there's a long way till they become obsolete. DDS1 and DDS2 are still supported, so even they, they aren't obsolete yet.

DDS5 will be launched very soon. I don't expect to get them obsolete in the very near future. There again, this is HP. :-)

HTH,
Vince

[John Payne_2]

While Dat's are not becoming obsolete, you have people like me who have 60+ servers and do not use DAT drives anymore. (For 1.5+ years now.) We used to do all our backups on DAT drives, but the overhead become too much. Also, the cost for maintainence was growing, so we moved to a DLT jukebox. Now we are headed to a larger LTO jukebox.

But recently, we brought in a turnkey system, and the vendor required us to mount a tape in the DAT drive for nightly system backups. DAT drives will be supported for a very long time, and there should not be concern for using them, if they suit your purpose and any backup/DR model you have...

Things like Ignite's make_recovery and firmware upgrades really no longer require a DAT drive, but it is an available option if you want.

John

[Daniel A. Lesley]

If DATs are not becoming obsolete, why is HP not going to offer maintenance contracts after 3/31/2003 on our pair??


Dan L.