Tape Storage Solutions...

Despite the prevailing market perception, tape has improved its position as a viable complement to disk for the foreseeable future due to its lower price per gigabyte, improved reliability, lower operating expenses and/ lower energy costs. The growth opportunity that lies ahead for tape storage solutions is increasing and is being fueled by the following advancements in tape technology: •Cartridge tape capacities will continue on an unprecedented growth pace and are expected to approach or exceed 60 terabyte by 2019. •The average price per gigabyte for automated tape library storage is expected to remain below that of magnetic disk storage for at least the foreseeable future. •The operating expense for automated tape systems should remain significantly below that of online disk storage as people, facilities and energy costs rise. •Tape media has a much longer storage life than disk, eliminating the need to migrate data to new media as frequently and reducing labor intensive conversion costs. •Archiving data in the cloud using the latest tape technology represents a new, untapped, and lower cost storage opportunity than today’s “only use disk in the cloud” approaches. •Bit error rates are considerably better for tape than disk favoring tape for applications requiring encryption and compression as the loss of a single bit renders data unrecoverable. The general perception of tape is often quite different than today’s reality as the magnetic tape industry has progressed significantly in the past 10 years. The latest technology developments in the tape industry indicate that while disk may address a growing portion of the backup and recovery market, tape will be more cost-effectively suited for the tier 3 archival opportunities, whether on-site or in the cloud. An updated understanding of today’s tape solutions can yield significant operational efficiencies. Tape is not going away, and we can now see its role is expanding from primarily a backup solution to that of a premier long-term archival storage technology. For tape it’s now “a new game with new rules”.