Storage Predictions 2016 - Cold Storage and Tape

Cold storage will become a hot technology in 2016

Storage vendors will step up efforts in alternative technologies for cold storage and how to make storage technology faster, cheaper and denser. High capacity, low cost and durability are important goals for cold storage. Presently, data retrieval and response time can be slower for a cold storage system than for devices or systems designed for active data. Media choices for cold storage include tape or low-cost commodity HDD drives. Object storage (Cleversafe) is one of the most common disk-based storage system types for cold data.

Tape storage will dominate cold data

Out of the massive data deluge comes a compound aggregate data growth rate of 48%. Since 2007, available storage has been growing more slowly than the amount of data being created. Also, 80% of the files created are inactive, creating what is commonly known as cold storage. There exists an opportunity for tape in this space because of its low cost. However, what is currently missing is the ability to access tape in the same way as we access object storage through standard APIs. Storage experts at IBM will be working closely with the Openstack community to allow tape as well as other high-latency media (spin-down disk, optical libraries) to be integrated into the cloud infrastructure.