Growing Tape Trend Expected to Continue in 05 and Beyond by Jennifer Burl

The Tape Storage Council, of which Iron Mountain is a proud representative, recently released a 2014 memo to highlight the current trends, tech innovations and usages occurring within the tape storage industry. To summarize the memo, if you haven't considered tape to be an innovative technology over the past decade, it's time to take note. Tape storage giants have been re-architecting the industry, and huge improvements have been made.

Tape today can effectively address many new data-intensive opportunities, in addition to its traditional role as a backup device. Such opportunities may include: surveillance, entertainment, compliance and Big Data. And, though it's important to note that disk has also made advancements, tape's progress over the past decade has been impressively greater.

Enterprise tape has grown to 10 TB native capacity with data rates as high as 360 MB/sec, and enterprise tape libraries can now extend beyond one exabtye. Oracle, IBM and StorageTek have stated that their companies will be building tape cartridge capacities beyond 10 TBs, with more capacity available in the future. Open systems users can now store more than 300 Blu-ray quality movies with the LTO-6 2.5 TB cartridge, and future LTO-10 cartridges will have the ability to store more than 14,400 Blu-ray movies.

Let's burst some myths surrounding tape storage in 2015:

MYTH: Disk drive reliability has surpassed tape reliability.

MYTH: Disk has a faster device data rate than tape.

MYTH: Tape's functionality and ease of use is overrated. (Truth: It's greatly enhanced with LTFS!)

MYTH: Tape has a much higher acquisition cost and TCO than disk.

TRUTH: Tape requires far less energy consumption than any other digital storage technology.

TRUTH: Tape has a longer shelf life than any other digital storage medium.

TRUTH: Tape cartridge capacity growth is on an unprecedented trajectory.

TRUTH: Tape can be seen as one volume, much like a hard drive (LTFS).

As you can see, significant innovations have been made in terms of tape storage, including: power efficiency, higher capacity, improved reliability, ease of use and budget-friendliness. If you haven't considered tape storage recently, you may want to take the time to do so (or have a second, or third, look!) Tape today has an amazing amount to offer.

For more information about tape today and in the future, be sure to stay tuned with the Tape Storage Council and its partner, Iron Mountain, and don't hesitate to contact us with any questions you may have.

LINK:	http://blogs.ironmountain.com/2014/service-lines/data-backup-and-recov...
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