Tape Value Proposition Compelling - Advocacy of Tape Storage Council

The Tape Storage Council, which includes representatives of BDT, Frontier BV, FUJIFILM, GazillaByte, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM, Imagine Products, Integra, Iron Mountain, NCE Computer Group, Oracle, Overland Storage, Qualstar, Quantum, REB Storage Systems, Spectra Logic, StrongBox Data Solutions, Tandberg Data, Turtle and XpresspaX has issued the following memo to highlight the current trends, usages and technology innovations occurring within the tape storage industry.

Technology Advances Propel Tape to New Markets - Industry Leading Capacity, Reliability, and Lowest Costs Are Changing the Game

Tape expanded its reach in 2016 effectively addressing many data intensive markets including cloud, entertainment, hyperscale data centers, HPC and the Internet along with large-scale data intensive applications such as big data, backup, recovery, long-term archive, DR, government compliance, while positioning for the unknown appetite of the IoT. The tape industry has been fueled by a decade of strong technological development and continues to play a major role for its traditional backup and DR services in addition to effectively addressing many new large-scale storage requirements. Demand for tape is being fueled by unrelenting data growth, significant technological advancements, tape's highly favorable economics, low energy requirements, and the growing regulatory and business requirements to maintain 'access to data forever.' Steady improvements have made tape technology the most reliable storage medium available, now surpassing the reliability of HDDs by three orders of magnitude. Disk technology has been advancing, but tape's progress over the last ten years has been even greater.

Tape's Value Proposition is Compelling

Continued development and investment in tape library, drive, media and data management software has effectively addressed the relentless demand for improved reliability, higher capacity, better power efficiency, ease of use and the lowest cost per gigabyte and TCO of any storage solution.

Below is a summary of tape's value proposition followed by key metrics for each:
• Tape drives have a BER (Bit Error Rate) of 1x10¹⁹ bits read, the highest reliability level of any storage device surpassing HDDs at 1x10¹⁶ by three orders of magnitude.
• Tape cartridge capacity is on an unprecedented trajectory with areal density projected to grow twice as fast as HDDs for the foreseeable future.
• Tape data rates are expected to be as much as five times faster than HDDs by 2025.
• Tape has a media life exceeding 30 years, longer than any other data center digital storage solution.
• Energy consumption for tape is less than HDDs with some studies showing tape energy consumption less than 2% of HDDs for the equivalent amount of storage.
• For archiving, TCO studies indicate today's disk based storage solutions are at least six times more costly per terabyte stored than solutions based on tape libraries.
• Tape's functionality and ease of use is enhanced with LTFS software and widespread HSM support.

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