Caught on tape

Smear campaigns and over-regulation are blamed for hindering growth of reused tape market in UK

End users continue to shun reused data tapes because of misconceptions about their reliability and security, industry onlookers have claimed.

Refurbished tape vendor eMediaPlus specialises in processing second-hand LTO and DLT tapes, which can be reused and sold on.

The company was launched in the channel last May to try to replicate the success of firms offering similar services in South Africa and the US.

Rupert Beeby, the firm's managing director, said getting the UK market to embrace reused media has been a challenge.

"I think the new tape manufacturers have done a great job of putting fear in the minds of customers about how reused products are not safe to use," said Beeby.

"That may have been true in the past, but technology has moved on. It is simply not the case any more."

Askar Sheibani, chief executive of IT repairs firm Comtek, said vendor scaremongering has hindered the growth of the entire reused market for many years.

"The recession has made it worse, and multinationals will resort to any means possible to drive up their sales and take business from the reuse market," he said.

"There is rarely a shred of evidence to back up the claims they make, but their profiles are so high, and their influence so great, that end users are often taken in."

Complex compliance
Data security and compliance regulations have also proved a sticking point for the reused tape market, added Beeby.

"The compliance regulations in this country are so complex that it is often easier for a company to destroy its tapes and send them to landfill than reuse them," he said.

In particular, the financial sector is one vertical that could be a major source of growth for the reuse market, he claimed, if compliance guidelines were made clearer.

"We offer a buy-back service and have spoken to banks that have told us they have more than 50,000 tapes we could have, but they are not sure how reusing them fits in with their guidelines, so we are not allowed to have them."

Sheibani said that compliance is a barrier to growth, but this pales into insignificance compared with the impact vendor scare stories have on end-user buying behaviours.

"Regulations can be a hindrance, but can usually be worked through," he said. "With scaremongering, it is a lot tougher because it usually involves a small business having to stand up to a much larger one."

Beeby agrees and said his company compensates for this by focusing on other industries that use a lot of tape, but have less onerous regulations.

"We are targeting the public sector and pharmaceutical and oil industries because those markets tend to use proprietary technology, such as IBM or Sun StorageTek tapes, which are highly sought after," he said.

An open channel
While end users are less accepting of reused media, the storage channel seems more willing to embrace the technology under certain conditions.

Gerard Marlow, general manager for business development at storage distributor Hammer, is open to the idea of employing reused tapes, so long as they are formatted and ­handled correctly.

"End users need to be aware of the implications of reusing media," said Marlow. "The more times a tape is written to, the more stress to the physical media and the more likely that tape is to develop bad blocks, resulting in failed backups."

Ray Quattromini, managing director of tape storage VAR Fortuna Power Systems, would require some quality assurances before recommending reused tapes to a customer.

"When customers purchase a tape drive and tapes, they want assurances that when their backups run, the data is being stored on tapes that are 100 per cent certified for that application," he said.

"Therefore, a recycled tape vendor would need to guarantee the integrity of the media stored on its products for at least five years and offer a no-quibble swap-out guarantee should the tapes prove faulty."

He would also insist on some kind of certification that confirms the tapes have been erased fully and contain no "zero" defects.

If the reused tape market is to take off in the UK, offering these kinds of assurances is vital, said Beeby. But other factors could also influence uptake in the long term.

"Fundamentally, cost is the most compelling factor because everyone is looking to save money," he said.

"There is also ongoing uncertainty about new tape supplies because of the Japanese earthquake, which might cause people to re-evaluate where they source products from."