So judging from the two NetApp emails below, the company posistion on LTO drivers for NetApp customers is this:

1) We can't get a free drive to make drivers with, so we won't.

2) And NetApp is going to wait a long time (as much as "2 years") to worry about LTO as there is no market for it.

The conclusion is that NetApp is to cheap to buy a drive and NetApp customers will have to buy LTO drives first before NetApp makes a driver (and there will have to be a lot of customers owning a drive before NetApp can justify making a driver).

Well thanks NetApp! But times have changed! Get with it! In the past tape drives have been ahead of the curve for storage as a whole. But now with the big disk drives in huge arrays, the tape drive is way behind. So when a new drive like the LTO comes out, customers want (need?) to ramp up to the technology as soon as possible. And the OEM people like NetApp that supply drivers need to be aware of this.

I, like many people, have a LTO drive now. And I am using it because I have a SUN driver for it. The driver was available when I bought the drive in January. On the other hand NetApp wants to wait? Why? To what advantage? The cost of a LTO drive is small change compared to your customer support issues. And waiting is only going to create problems between NetApp and it's customers. Help us please!

Just my two cents worth.

*************************************************************************** Glenn Marsh Lattice Semiconductor Corporation Unix Systems Administrator 5555 NE Moore Court CAD Engineering Hillsboro, Oregon 97124 glenn.marsh@latticesemi.com 503-268-8000 503-268-8136 phone - 503-268-8459 fax ***************************************************************************

From: "Alvarado, Michael" michael.alvarado@netapp.com To: "'David A. Chapa'" david@datastaff.com, Moshe Linzer Moshe.Linzer@nsc.com Cc: "Collie, Michael" Michael.Collie@netapp.com, Steve Vawter svawter@c-cube.com, ryanb@enteract.com, toasters@mathworks.com Subject: RE: LTO support? Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2001 19:37:51 -0800

Yes LTO has been discussed extensively but all of the potential LTO suppliers have been unable to supply NetApp with any LTO devices and the SCSI device driver cannot be written without a drive. IBM prioritized other vendors ahead of NetApp. Here is where it is helpful to the end use customers make clear to suppliers that NetApp support is strategic and important.

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From: "Stringer, Douglas" Douglas.Stringer@netapp.com To: "'David A. Chapa'" david@datastaff.com Cc: "Collie, Michael" Michael.Collie@netapp.com, "'toasters@mathworks.com'" toasters@mathworks.com, "'ryanb@enteract.com'" ryanb@enteract.com Subject: RE: LTO support? Date: Wed, 14 Mar 2001 15:38:25 -0800

David: Yes, we've heard of it, and LTO as a supported tape format is on our roadmap. Please bear with me on this as I want to weed through the 'talk' and the 'hype' that jumps out at me in the below messages. Data protection and restorability is very serious business, not glamorous, not sexy, but pretty darn important if a company's business depends on it. Our goal here is to bring to our installed and new customer base a standard of 'proven' reliability in maintaining data integrity so that operations in workgroups-to-enterprise level environments go on as expected. With that in mind, field reliability and data to prove it out are top on the list of priorities for our certified solutions. Coming from a tape drive manufacturing area myself, I know that introduction (i.e. shipping vs. development and marketing) of a new tape format follows a fairly slow curve during the first two years before market/customer acceptance kicks in. LTO, as well as SDLT, will get there probably sooner due to both coming from the 'linear tape format' world and all manufacturers have a wealth of tape experience with other formats.

Regards, Doug Stringer

****************************************************************************** Glenn Marsh Lattice Semiconductor Corporation Unix Systems Administrator 5555 NE Moore Court CAD Engineering Hillsboro, Oregon 97124 glenn.marsh@latticesemi.com 503-268-8000 503-268-8136 phone - 503-268-8459 fax ******************************************************************************