At Perpetual Storage we’re constantly on the lookout for resources and information addressing the growing costs and risks associated with backing up valuable information.

Of course we’re absolute believers in off-site storage of digital data, especially in our secure solid granite vault. Many of our clients store tape backups, and some keep hard drives and even disks at our vault.

We found a couple recently published white papers that provide excellent commentary on tape backups, dubbed “the optimal low cost storage medium for long term data retention,” and want to share them with our clients and friends.

Both reports are available by following the links included in this Aug. 24, 2011 Business Wire announcement.

The announcement begins:

“The Linear Tape-Open (LTO) Program Technology Provider Companies, HP, IBM and Quantum, announced today that two recently-released separate studies found that tape had significant total cost of ownership (TCO) benefits over disk, including lower cost per GB, lower operating expenses and lower energy costs.

“The two studies, from the Enterprise Strategy Group and The Clipper Group, evaluated the costs of long-term storage for various scenarios that included tape and disk as the primary storage medium. In each case, the studies found that tape had considerable long-term cost advantages when compared to a scenario that relied on a disk-only solution.”

We recommend you check out the two white papers:

“A Comparative TCO Study: VTLs and Physical Tape” by Mark Peters, Feb. 2011, published by the Enterprise Strategy Group

“In Search of the Long-Term Archiving Solution — Tape Delivers Significant TCO Advantage over Disk” by analysts David Reine and Mike Kahn, Dec. 2010, published by The Clipper Group

The comparative study article reports significant savings for Linear Tape-Open (LTO) versus Virtual Tape Libraries (VTL):

“In a head-to-head comparison, the VTL with deduplication TCO ranges from 1.78 to 2.46 times higher than the LTO-5 tape library TCO. In all cases, the LTO-5 library has a lower TCO and is $436,876 less expensive than the VTL deduplication appliance over five years.”