Tape Backup

Last year, Sony had entered the Club with a very small UPI of
14. HP had been the leader in this segment for two years. However, Sony seems to
have gained popularity to become the most-preferred brand, pushing last year’s
winner HP to number two.

The third brand in the category is a new entrant to the Club–3M.
The company is primarily a backup company, and its major release was the Travan
NS. Then of course, 3M floppy disks were very popular.

In regional preferences, Sony was the favorite brand in the
West. HP was consistent across all regions, and 3M only gathered some votes from
the South and West. Support for Sony up north was pretty weak.

Backup technology is no longer the domain of tape drives.
Many new products and technologies have emerged. The previous year saw some
major technological advancements. The concept of storage area networks came into
being. HP introduced some new concepts in network backup. The recent release–the
SureStore AutoBackup–looks like a PC, and can take backup of all Windows
clients on a network. This includes not just the client’s data, but also the
entire operating system. Not only that, you can also create emergency recovery
CDs using the backup.

CD Writers became so popular that we decided to introduce it
as a new segment this year. Iomega has been constantly innovating in this area.
The Clik! drive was a neat concept. This drive was the size of a PCMCIA card,
and so could fit into a notebook. The media could store 40 MB of data. It was an
ideal choice for mobile executives who didn’t want to carry too much around.

With all this innovation, will tape drives gradually phase
out? Not in the near future at least, because they still serve as an economical
option for backing up huge amounts of data. Sony has managed to break HP’s
monopoly in the segment. Let’s see, if it can keep the momentum next year, and
is able to get enough backup from users.