The Business Value of LTO
Tape Storage in 2015
Two recently published analyst reports deliver powerful
proof points for strong ongoing customer demand for tape in 2015:
• The Worldwide Tape
Market (including tape drives, tape libraries and tape media) is estimated to be
worth around $2Bn in CY14.
• Worldwide Tape Media Tracker reports that more data is being stored on tape
media than ever before with a capacity shipped growth of 13% year on year in Q3
2014.
So why does tape looks set to remain so popular in 2015 for
data protection in general and archive in particular? The answer lies in the
on-going business value of the technology. Tape has made great technological
strides over the last decade – from a performance, capacity, reliability and
usability perspective. But while feeds and speeds are important, the executive
boards of most companies care more about how technology can lower costs, reduce
risk and improve productivity in their organization. And it is in this business
context that tape continues to be viewed as important and relevant.
Containing Costs
Tape continues to offer one of the lowest costs per Terabyte
for any type of storage, particularly when factoring in energy and footprint
costs. A recent analyst total cost of ownership comparison of a LTO tape library
and a disk array concluded that over a 9 year period disk storage is 26 x the
average TCO of tape. The cost of energy alone for the average disk-based
solution exceeded the entire TCO for the average tape-based solution.
Reducing Risk
The overriding customer defined metric for a successful
backup or archive is whether the data can be restored or retrieved when needed.
The LTO tape portfolio of drives, libraries and media employs a number of
features to help provide high data integrity including read after write
verification to help ensure the data has been written accurately, servo tracking
mechanisms to provide precision head and tape alignment, up to 250,000 mean time
between failure hours for drives, and advanced media formulations that can allow
up to a 30-year shelf life or more.
Tape Libraries also deliver a range of reliability and
availability benefits including hardware redundancy, path failover, proactive
health monitoring software and data archive verification software.
In addition lightweight, rugged and
encryptable tape cartridges are easily and securely transported off site. This
means that data on tape can be held off-line safe from the threats to on-line
data from viruses, hackers and cyber-attacks.
Improving Productivity
With the pace of data growth continuing to accelerate,
businesses require a fast and easy way to expand and manage their data
protection and retention infrastructure.
Tape is effortlessly scalable. Adding
capacity is simply a case of adding additional tape cartridges to a tape drive
or tape library. With a product portfolio that spans from tape media through
standalone tape drives to tape libraries that accommodate more than 75 PB in a
single system, BackupWorks Tape Storage offerings deliver virtually limitless
capacity.
And
Linear Tape File System (LTFS) provides a self-describing file system on a LTO-5
or LTO-6 cartridge, which makes tape as simple to access, use and share as a
removable USB flash drive as well as reducing software dependencies for the use
of tape for long-term archives.