Informaton Storage Industry Conclusions and Recommendations on Tape

Tape has several attributes which favor it over disk for long-term archival use, including its considerably lower cost (both acquisition and operating costs) and its higher data reliability. An important contributing factor to tape’s lower cost is its significantly lower power consumption compared to disk. Energy saving in the data center environment has taken on an importance of its own, beyond strictly cost implications, because data centers are now concerned about the availability of sufficient power for their future operations. 

For the above reasons and more, the use of tape continues to be an important element in most enterprise IT operations. The most common approach for enterprise storage today is not to deliberate whether to use flash or disk or tape, but instead how to best use flash, disk, and tape in an integrated approach for both data protection and archive, taking advantage of what each storage technology offers. Software that presents a standard interface, such as NFS, CIFS, or OpenStack Swift, has enabled tiered storage solutions that are transparent to the applications. There are several industry segments where archival storage on tape has become a strategic part of the operation, of which several examples have been detailed in this report. 

A further ongoing development in the IT environment is the growth of public cloud storage, which continues to accelerate. Cloud storage services are offered with a variety of business models and pricing schemes. Many of these services are highly cost sensitive and/ or critically dependent on maintaining security and integrity of the stored data. Tape’s fundamental attributes, especially low cost, high data reliability, and transparent encryption, make it ideal for its use in cloud storage offerings. 

We expect that tape will continue to play a strong role in future data storage environments; however, that will require ongoing attention to advancing tape technology and its ease of use. First and foremost, the research and development to support aggressive tape density and capacity advances must continue, for tape to maintain its significant cost advantage over disk. Please refer to section 2 for details on the 10-year roadmap, which shows robust improvements in capacity resulting in lower TCO to maintain that ost advantage. To support increased use of tape for archival storage, advances in tape data organization and associated supporting software, that enable easy access to specific data records in the archive, must continue to be developed. Continuation of software products that migrate data to new generations of hardware have benefited the adoption and use of tape and they must continue. The development of tape drive and media products that extend backward compatibility to two or three generation have also helped reduce the need for frequent migrations and helped tape’s adoption for large digital archives and must continue going forward. Finally, although the outlook for tape presented here is very positive, the industry should strive to better educate customers and better publicize the inherent and significant advantages of tape storage.