Tape Storage “State of the Union”

Marije Gould, Vice President of Marketing, Tandberg Data

This week, a large group of representatives of the Tape Industry –12 Tape Manufacturers and Service Providers – talked to key industry analysts and discussed current trends, usages and overall health of the tape industry. I wanted to share a few of the highlights of what was discussed and covered in a memo:

The tape discussion continues to focus on cost of ownership and some people believe disk will overtake tape when it comes to cost per GB. Have a look at this data:

• LTO-5 tape costs up to 15x less than SATA disk for long-term archive of large quantities of data
• TCO of tape solutions is approximately 2-5 times less than VTL with deduplication for backup solutions
• A single administrator on average can manage up to one hundred terabytes of disk data or up to multiple petabytes of data on tape

I also can't resist covering the topic of reliability. Many "facts around tape" seem to have come from fiction – and the reliability of tape is remarkable:

• Individual tape media cartridges are 2-4 orders of magnitude more reliable than SATA disk drives
• NERSC study shows automated tape systems have a proven reliability of more than five 9's (99.999%)

I also found out that the National Geographic Global Media uses tape. They use it to store large video archives (5-10TB a day) and many images. To quote them: "It uses less space, less power and less cooling."

Finally, when talking about cloud and tape, and performance, I loved the following comment: "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a FedEx plane full of tapes!"