Tape remains a strong and innovative industry, with ever increasing capacities, performance and cost of ownership gains. But don’t just take our word for it! There has been a huge amount of press and analyst coverage looking at these positive developments in tape and in today’s Tapetember update, we want to share the highlights with you.

“In the past, many pundits have claimed that “Tape is Dead”. Well, years later, tape continues to thrive and reach new capacity and performance milestones.”

Clipper Group, July 2015

Customer demand for tape remains strong:

• The worldwide tape market was worth over $2.0 billion in 2014*
• Shipped tape capacity reached an all time high of 6,638 PB in Q4 CY14 *
• More data is being stored on tape with record levels of tape media capacity shipments
• Installed base of 5.0 million LTO tape drives and over 275 million LTO cartridges
• LTO-6 tape adoption has outpaced previous generation
• LTO-7 is just around the corner

* IDC/Santa Clara Consulting Group

The need for tape for peace of mind archiving remains strong:

• According to “Worldwide File And Object Based Storage 2013 – 2017 Forecast” (IDC, July 2013), data to manage and archive will grow to 173 EB by 2017
• A report from the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (February 15, 2013), highlights that 80% of data is not accessed again 90 days after creation, so storing all this cold data is an ever-growing challenge.
• According to the IDC Digital Universe study, transactions on the web will exceed 450 billion per day by 2020.
• The Internet of Things could generate colossal amounts of data that will need to be archived.
• New markets and applications are being identified - for example, wearable body cameras

“Is tape a part of the future of storage? Absolutely. Despite propaganda spread around by disk and flash vendors, tape is very much alive and will play a major part in combatting rampant storage growth in the years ahead. Not only that, the field has already mapped out a ten-year path that promises much higher density and more rapid throughput.”

Infostor Magazine, September 2015

Other Highlights

In a paper “Continuing the Search for the Right Mix of Long-Term Storage Infrastructure — A TCO Analysis of Disk and Tape Solutions” (July 2015), Clipper Group reported that tape enjoys a 6X cost advantage over disk for long term archiving over a period of nine years.

TThis ties in with recent reports that LTO tape now costs less than one penny per GB.

It’s one of the reasons why analysts like Fred Moore, President, Horison Information Strategies, believe a tape renaissance is underway.

At the end of 2014, the Tape Storage Council released a memo, Data Growth and Technology Innovations Fuel Tape’s Future.

And Information Age reviewed how today's tape is best suited for today's big data requirements.

Storage DNA is a hugely innovative company in the media and entertainment industry. Its President and CEO, Tridib "tC" Chakravarty sees a bright future for the tape industry. A good example of his comments is the way that LTO Ultrium tape is being used to archive major league baseball footage Preserving America's Pastime.

These are just a snapshot of the many articles that have been published about tape recently and the message seems clear.

Tape is not just back, it has never really been away and it won’t be leaving anytime soon!

Article credit: Dawn Svenson-Holland