Definition: Exabyte Corporation

(Exabyte Corporation, Boulder, CO) Founded in 1985, for many years Exabyte was one of the world's leading providers of tape drives and tape storage products. Its high-capacity 8mm tape drives, introduced in 1987, were sold through OEM and reseller partners. Exabyte used to offer QIC and DAT drives from acquisitions in the 1990s.

The VXA Alliance
Along with Imation, Sony and TDK, Exabyte was a founding member of the VXA Alliance industry group. VXA was a packet tape technology that restored and backed up data by reading and writing discrete packets, rather than by sequential linear tracking. Fourth generation VXA products doubled compressed data capacity to 640GB.

Sold to Tandberg and Overland
In 2006, Norway-based Tandberg Data, itself a well-known manufacturer of archival and storage products, acquired Exabyte and all rights to its VXA technology. Eight years later, Overland Storage purchased the Tandberg Data company.