Tape has its own take on that much-used quote from Mark Twain about reports of his death being greatly exaggerated. In fact, there have been seemingly hundreds of reported “deaths” since I first got tangled in tape during the Reagan Administration.
Here’s the truth: Tape is very much alive, and in certain applications, it’s as viable as ever. For the pessimistic in the crowd, look no further than a recent IDC report on mid-range tape automation. It states that tape is a $1.2 billion market. How can that be, you ask? Well, many leading manufacturers have huge investments in tape technology. That’s why tape is still here today and isn’t going away any time soon. Simply put, the ranks of the LTO Consortium, which include the likes of HP, IBM, Imation, Maxell, Quantum and Sony, all have big strategic initiatives in tape and see sustaining value in the technology.
So even if SLDT may be at the end of its life, a quick look around the corporate landscape would prove LTO tape technology is doing quite well. You would be hard-pressed to go into any enterprise today and not find tape playing an integral role in any overarching data protection strategy. So don’t go writing tape’s obituary just yet because HP and Quantum are working feverishly on polishing up the next generation of technology, LTO-5.
LTO-5 will deliver 1.6 TBs of native capacity—twice that of the previous tape generation. And with compression playing an ever increasing role in any tape library, it’s not unlikely 3 TBs is possible. While speed should also increase, it may not necessarily double. On the drawing board, LTO-6, which should appear in 2010 or 2011, should double capacity, if not speed, once again. In addition, many industry watchers are predicting LTO-6 will bring the first appearance of a 3 TB cartridge. So there’s a lot to be excited about.
Tape’s long life can be traced to several, sustaining virtues: high capacity, low cost, excellent portability. What has changed, however, is how tape is best utilized in the corporate scheme of things. Sure, tape has long exceeded its best usefulness as a first line of backup. Disk has ascended the throne of near-line backup and retention, and rightfully so. We work in a world demanding immediate responsiveness, and disk delivers that kind of instant access to data and lightning-fast restores.
But the importance of long-term archiving, especially for regulatory compliance and disaster recovery, is growing every year in the corporate world. So for applications where performance is less of an issue yet capacity can double at least every 18 months and the data needs to be available for years, I say stick to tape.
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Peri Grover
Director, Product Management