HPE tops in tape. Yes, tape is still a thing

Nothing too flashy, but it still makes bucks on ribbons of rust

IDC says HPE is the big cheese in the tape systems market, getting more revenue from streaming ribbons of rust devices than anybody else.

The research firm's Worldwide Quarterly Tape Tracker for the first half of 2016 says HPE is the tape device primary canine because it's number 1 in :

• stand-alone tape drives with 5X the revenue of its nearest competitor,
• tape autoloaders (1-20 slots), with twice the revenue of its nearest competitor,
• mid-range tape automation (101-500 slots), with MSL6480 product growing share by 8.7 per cent
• tape libraries (21-500 slots) - with a Y/Y share gain of 2.2 percentage points
• The MSL6480 gained almost 17 percentage points of share year on year in EMEA
• It's number 1 in EMEA open systems tape drive and tape automation (1-1000+ slots) – with a Y/Y share gain of 3.7 percentage points - so not world-wide then

HPE boasts about its tape market success in this blog

The company's strategy of taking share from other vendors in this mature, declining market is paying off. Its revenues are based on LTO format drives, with LTO-7 being the latest format introduced to its range.

IBM ships LTO format devices as well as its own proprietary formats. Oracle, too, has its own proprietary tape format products. After HPE and IBM, Quantum is the third member of the LTO consortium and ships some products via HPE.

SpectraLogic is the other main tape device supplier and has aggressively expanded into disk-based storage as well - with, for example its Verde and Black Pearl products.

We do not have access to IDC's report and so cannot provide market share numbers for HPE and these other suppliers. ®