Tape technology has rapidly advanced over the past 10 years. Today’s technology is nothing like tape from the past. It is fast, searchable, lives longer, encrypted, more reliable and has a larger capacity yet, remains inexpensive. Tape archiving is still the best solution for backup and archive.
Why Tape for Backup and Archive?
Tape is an intriguing choice for both backup and archive. It is reliable, robust and has the lowest total cost of ownership among backup and archive media.
In fact, Overland Storage, a provider of data protection and data management solutions across the data lifecycle, conducted a study of its customers in the United States and determined “tape-based storage remains a critical part of any data protection strategy due to its cost of ownership, portability, lower energy consumption, long shelf life, robust design and compact footprint advantages.”
Findings include:
50% without tape storage, their business could not manage
56% keep data on disk for a month or less then move it to tape
74% use tape storage for onsite backups
63% use tape storage for offsite backups and disaster recovery
80% do not believe that archiving to the cloud will replace tape storage
According to Enterprise Strategy Group, “the use of tape now dominates archiving over internal disk, external disk or cloud. Further, tape’s lead is expected to grow during the next five years, demonstrating 45 percent compound annual growth by 2015.”
New Features that have driven tape rebirth:
Price HDD is 2-15xs the cost of tape for back-up or archive and the Cloud is much higher
Reliability Tape drive reliability level of 99%
WORM Write Once Read Many – provides encryption
LTFS Linear Tape File System – provides a drag & drop system regardless of platform
Media Life tape media has reached 30+ years (disk remains at 4-5 yrs.)
Capacity Current tape is 8.5TB and >20TB compressed (disk 4TB plus as it grows, so does RAID rebuild times)
DR Easy to move data with out electricity
Energy Inactive data does not consume energy saving tons in power
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