DDS-4 Follow-Up To Ship Next Month

Certance, a Seagate-affiliated company that until recently was known as Seagate Removable Storage Solutions, plans to start shipping DAT 72 drives in July, said Mike Lakowicz, vice president of product strategy and business development at the company.

Rather than naming the format DDS-5, as it is the follow-on to the DDS-3 and DDS-4 formats, Certance and Hewlett-Packard have named it DAT 72 to avoid any intellectual issues with Sony, which owns the DDS name, said Lakowicz. The three companies had cooperated on the previous four generations of the drives. However, Sony at this time does not appear to be involved in the development of the new drive format, he said.

DAT 72 drives can write 36 Gbytes on a single drive at 3.5 MBps, before compression is used. The drives are read-compatible and write-compatible with DDS-3 and DDS-4 tapes.

The DAT 72 drives are aimed primarily at the low-end server space, especially at small and midsize businesses, said Lakowicz. "It is a great value proposition for both OEM and white-box servers," he said. "It is also good for use in department and backups, restores and archiving."

Lakowicz said he expects tier-one server producers to make the drives options on their servers starting next quarter.