VALHALLA, N.Y., November 13, 2019 – The Tape Storage Council today issued its State of the Tape Industry report, which reveals that tape continued to expand its offerings and reach in 2018 and 2019. Growth within the tape industry has been fueled by more than a decade of significant technological development and this trend shows no sign of letting up.
The role tape serves in today’s modern data centers is quickly expanding into new markets because compelling technological advancements have made tape the most economical, highest capacity, and the most reliable and secure storage medium available. The value of the tape air gap in cybercrime prevention has provided a distinct advantage over other mediums.
Today’s storage technology hierarchy consists of three technologies - SSDs, HDDs, and tape, and the ideal storage implementation optimizes the strengths of each. Tape serves multiple roles for the rapidly expanding hyperscale, enterprise, internet, and cloud data centers as tape capacity can more easily scale without adding more drives – this is not the case with HDDs where each capacity increase requires another drive and quickly becomes costlier than tape. Using tape for cloud archives, rather than HDDs, greatly reduces cloud TCO and creates a much more energy-efficient cloud service and data center.
Steady technology improvements continue to give tape the lowest cost, highest capacity, fastest data transfer rates, and most reliable storage medium available, with the reliability of tape outperforming the best HDDs by three orders of magnitude. Since the first LTO drive, LTO-1, was announced in 2001 with a native capacity of 100 GB, the LTO roadmap has expanded and now defines generations through LTO-12, which provides 192 TB native capacity, representing a 1,920x capacity increase from LTO-1.
In addition, the arrival of the IBM TS1160 enterprise tape drive has helped tape tackle mounting storage-intensive challenges, including cloud storage, high-performance computing (HPC), and the expanding number of hyperscale data centers. The new drive has also well-positioned tape to serve the unknown appetite of entertainment, surveillance, and the rapid emergence of the IoT and edge computing.
Modern tape continues to drive reliability, capacity, and data rates to the highest levels in the storage industry, making it the most cost-effective, long-term storage solution available.
About The Tape Storage Council
The Tape Storage Council includes representatives of BDT, Detron, Frontier BV, FUJIFILM, GazillaByte, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM, Imagine Products, Insurgo Media, Integra, Iron Mountain, Park Place Technologies, Oracle, Overland Storage, Qualstar, Quantum, REB Storage Systems, Spectra Logic, StrongBox Data Solutions, Tandberg Data, Turtle, and XpresspaX. For more information, go to https://tapestorage.org/
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Media Contacts
IGNITE Consulting
Linda Dellett
303-439-9398
Linda@igniteconsultinginc.com
