[ Thanks to Paul
Shread for this link. ]
“Tape library support: More likely than not, if you buy a
library from someone other than IBM or Oracle, the only tape drives
that will be supported will be LTO drives. In addition, you will
not find IBM libraries supporting Oracle drives, nor IBM drives in
an Oracle library. The qualification for tape drives within a
library cannot be easily accomplished without the consent and help
of a vendor, and why would IBM or Oracle want to help a competitor
sell libraries? So what ends up happening is that enterprise tapes
are only available from enterprise tape drive vendors in their own
libraries, which leads to a lack of competition for drives in tape
libraries.“Enterprise tape standards: When IBM developed the original 3480
tape cartridge, which in my opinion was the starting point for
enterprise tape, that technology became synonymous with tape.
Everyone wanted to copy that form factor and format, and that’s
what they did. IBM compatible tapes were the only enterprise tape,
even though there were plenty of enterprise disk vendors.“With several different enterprise disk vendors, there was a
clear effort to define differences. By the late 1980s, the SCSI
standard was released, and soon thereafter IDE, which eventually
became the ATA standard and then SATA. It became clear by the 1990s
that the standard for enterprise drives in open systems was
3.5-inch SCSI drives.”