Tape drive innovator tries climbing back in spotlight

BOULDER — Exabyte Corp. (Nasdaq: EXBT), the once golden child of the tape drive industry, is banking on its Mammoth II storage tape, due out sometime in the fourth quarter, and its NetStorM Initiative, software to manage network storage, to rebound the company into the spotlight.

The company has had to trim some fat to revamp its image as innovator in the highly competitive data-storage industry. About 80 jobs from the company’s repair business will be outsourced, resulting in “not insignificant savings,” according to Chief Financial Officer and General Counsel Scott Smith. And according to Chief Executive Bill Marriner in a press release, “The current bottom-line performance is being impacted by the investments that we are making to solidify the company’s future market opportunities.”

These future market opportunities are all focused on the storage area network systems that companies rely on today to back up massive amounts of data. Exabyte had been known for making big boxes’ — the tape libraries and the tape drives. But now that companies need to back up and retrieve gigabytes of information, single servers or even a network of tape libraries isn’t sufficient to meet their needs.

SPONSORED CONTENT

How dispatchable resources enable the clean energy transition

Platte River must prepare for the retirement of 431 megawatts (MW) of dispatchable, coal-fired generation by the end of the decade and address more frequent extreme weather events that can bring dark calms (periods when there is no sun or wind).

As Steve Georgis, director of technology at Exabyte puts it, “People haven’t thought of Exabyte as a systems maker, but as a box maker. We used to own the tape drive library industry; we had 70 percent of the market. Now we only have a fraction of the market. We had to create a software engineering group. We have entire departments that didn’t exist a couple of years ago.”

To support NetStorM, Exabyte added about 25 people. And there is room for more engineers. They built what looks like Darth Vader’s bedroom as a lab to demonstrate NetStorM — a darkly lit lab with large black-cushioned chairs, several large monitors and huge black cabinets that hold data storage components like a futuristic stereo system.

NetStorM is not a product that can be boxed and shipped. It combines all the parts that a company will need to back up data by the gigabyte: high-bandwidth fibre channel connectivity; servers, which have a host adapter; routers that give fiber channel a way to connect to storage devices and the storage devices themselves.

Exabyte doesn’t make all these pieces. It makes some of them, but the innovation is that Exabyte designed software that connects all the steps together and lets someone remotely manage the data from the Web. To make this communication between parts possible, Exabyte got the OK from each of the other device makers, such as Seagate, which makes tape drives; BROCADE, which makes fibre channel fabric switches; Gadzoox Networks, which makes SAN products and others.

“All the devices have a management port, and they all speak (the same language),” Georgis said. “(The companies) didn’t have to tell us any deep-dark secrets about their box, they just had to tell us about their management port, the interfaces.”

Resellers come to the Boulder site and receive training on how to configure the system, and how to offer support. But the beauty of the NetStorM program is that Exabyte is willing to handle all the customer service questions, even if it’s a question about someone else’s equipment that connects to an Exabyte machine.

“We’ve been working with all the major companies as partners,” Georgis said. “We understand what backup is all about. We have been doing it longer than anyone in the world.”