It May Be Too Soon to Dismiss Tape Storage
January 20, 2015
Is the cloud giving new life to tape? The Register reports on “The Year When Google Made TAPE Cool Again….” With both Google and Amazon archiving data onto tape, the old medium suddenly seems relevant again. Our question—does today’s tape guarantee 100% restores? We want to see test results. One cannot find information that is no longer there, after all.
The article hastens to point out that the tape-manufacturing sector is not out of the irrelevance woods yet. Reporter Chris Mellor writes about industry attempts to survive:
“Overall the tape backup market is still in decline, with active vendors pursuing defensive strategies. Struggling tape system vendors Overland Storage and Tandberg Data, both pushing forwards in disk-based product sales, are merging in an attempt to gain critical and stable business mass for profitable revenues.
“Quantum still has a large tape business and is managing its decline and hoping a profitable business will eventually emerge. SpectraLogic has emerged as an archive tape champion and one of the tape technology area’s leaders, certainly the most visionary with the Black Pearl technology.
“Oracle launched its higher-capacity T10000D format and IBM is pushing tape drive and media capacity forwards, heading past a 100TB capacity tape.”
The write-up concludes with ambivalence about the future of tape. Mellor does not see the medium disappearing any time soon, but is less confident about its long-term relevance. After all, who knows what storage-medium breakthrough is around the corner?
Cynthia Murrell, January 20, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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