While PC storage options have expanded rapidly in recent years with the emergence of optical formats, tape remains by far the dominant medium for serious corporate computing.
Why? Portability, high capacity, speed, and reliability are all important factors in tape’s continued dominance, while new technological developments are positioning tape for a new range of applications.
Because they are robust enough to transport from site to site while still storing several servers’ worth of data, tapes remain a flexible choice for companies that want to ensure essential business information isn’t put at risk. The low cost and high capacity of hard drives has made them an appealing “cheap and cheerful” backup solution for individual systems, but conventional hard drive technology lacks the reliability offered by even decades-old tape systems. Just try popping a hard drive in your jacket pocket and racing to the lift.
Tape’s portability factor appeal has been threatened in recent years by the emergence of optical media such as CDs and DVDs, which offer an equally robust format and can, in many cases, be read by a wider variety of hardware. However, optical formats are yet to match the volumes which can be offered by most tape systems, and—in the case of DVD—have been bogged down in industry debates over standards.
The earliest tape drives supported capacities of 1.4MB—a massive amount of data half a century ago, but equal to a floppy disk today. Capacities, however, have grown rapidly since that time. Most modern formats typically offer a base size of between 40GB and 100GB, and this capacity continues to expand. IBM recently demonstrated tape technology capable of storing a terabyte of data on a single cartridge, which it hopes to develop commercially over the next few years, while Sony’s plans for a Super-AIT format (S-AIT) extend to a four-terabyte capacity by 2007.
A less often discussed but equally important aspect of tape usage is speed. When dealing with large volumes of data that need to be copied in a relatively short time frame, transfer speed can prove a more important aspect than capacity (especially since auto-changers make it relatively simple to use multiple cartridges). Transfer speeds can be further enhanced with the judicious use of compression. Conversely, excessive speed may lead to unreliable data storage, especially on older equipment.
And older equipment abounds. While capacities and speed continue to improve, much tape technology remains unchanged from its origins as an audio storage format more than half a century ago. One study by tape industry research firm Freeman Reports found that nine million quarter-inch linear tape systems are in use around the world. Because reliability is a more important consideration in most backup applications than technological innovation, this lack of development is viewed positively by many tape users.
Although tape-based backup has a long history, many businesses have yet to realise the critical importance of data recovery. “Many companies do not have complete backup and recovery systems and business executives have been asking their CIOs and data centre managers what they have to do to enhance them,” said Philip Belcher, managing director for storage reseller StorageTek Australia. A study conducted by StorageTek found that 75 percent of organisations believed their disaster recovery capabilities could be improved, while more than half wanted speedier restoration of backups.
Those figures demonstrate why, despite its boring reputation, storage on tape remains big business. By 2006, research firm Ovum estimates that mid-range storage systems alone will be a US$30 billion market. Estimating the overall size of the market is harder, especially given the wide range of technologies already deployed.
Despite predictions of its demise, the role of tape may well expand rather than contract in future years. “Contrary to popular belief, the storage pyramid will reflect a larger role for tape rather than less,” the Aberdeen Group points out in a recent white paper. “For financial reasons (relative cost) and fiduciary reasons (safety and security through use of alternative—and removable—media), tape’s role in backup will not decline significantly. Tape will continue to perform its essential backup function for mission-critical applications—those database-oriented applications that make up the heart of a typical IT applications portfolio. But tape will do more. Tape matches up very well with emerging demands for the new content that is driving storage demands.”
