Exabyte ready for Mammoth struggle over storage market

Storage vendor Exabyte launched the second generation of its high-capacity tape format, Mammoth2, at Comdex this week.

Storage vendor Exabyte launched the second generation of its high-capacity tape format, Mammoth2, at Comdex this week.

Bill Mariner, chief executive of Exabyte, claimed that Mammoth2 has until March 2000 as the clear performance leader, when IBM, Hewlett Packard and Seagate's Linear Tape Open (LTO) technology become available.

It will then have to compete on the basis of LTO's pricing - expected to be roughly double that of Exabyte's product - and Mammoth2's smaller form factor, allowing greater capacity and throughput per automated tape library.

Exabyte is trying to win back the market share that Quantum won with its DLT format, which Mariner said he is confident will become obsolete.

Mariner added the market for near-line storage, used by applications where a delay of one or two seconds is acceptable when retrieving data, will grow sharply as companies build up vast databases of customer information with which to target ecommerce content.