Global Trends, Applications and Use Cases for Tape Adoption - 2024 Executive
Summary by the LTO Program
A new report by INSIC, the Information Storage Industry Consortium, provides key insights about the current storage marketplace highlighting the role that tape
storage plays in this space. The report delivers in-depth discussion on a variety of storage topics including market and technology trends, cost analysis, energy
consumption, vertical industries and workloads, and sustainability. Suffice it to say, this is a comprehensive report that was created in a collaborative effort by
industry experts and analysts. This document provides short summaries of key sections of the INSIC 2024 report which can be downloaded separately.
The Global Trends, Applications and Use Cases for Tape Adoption Report 2024
summarizes that tape storage has inherent and fundamental usage, cost and longevity
benefits including “… low acquisition cost, extremely low power consumption,
excellent footprint density, scalability, and … reliability.” It stresses that tape can protect
data with a number of attributes that include “The inherent air-gap design of tape
[which] makes it the choice for offline data protection and portability, providing
significant protection from cyberattacks.” The air-gap design means that when a tape
cartridge is removed from the drive it is offline, that is, an air-gap is created between
the tape and the system preventing on-line cyber-access to the offline tapes. If online
data is compromised the offline protected tape data can be used to recover.
Go Green
ne of the substantial market trends
is making the data center as green
as possible. Power and cooling
requirements and expenses are a
substantial consideration in data center
design. Data centers have been shown
to generate up to 2 percent of global
CO2 emissions. The report explains
that “Tape has an inherent architectural
advantage for inactive data at scale.
Using removable media that consumes
no power when not in use provides a
huge power and cooling saving over
other storage technology choices.
A study by Brad Johns Consulting
concluded that a disk archive
consumes 96 percent more power
than a tape-based solution. Tape’s
carbon footprint is also reduced. The
same study showed a CO2e saving
with tape of about 97 percent.” There
is a lot more to glean on this subject in
the full report.
Data Growth
“We now live in an era of minimal data
deletion. In a recent study by Further
Research, businesses expressed
overwhelming preference for
keeping all their data rather than try to
selectively curate their data archives,”
notes the INSIC report. Data growth
and retention is a key consideration for
storage management decision criteria,
as described in the report: According to Gartner, 80% of all data stored in the future
will be unstructured. Between 60% and
70% is Enterprise content that is infrequently
accessed but just needs [to be] retained
for some essential purpose. Furthur Market
Research estimates that as much as 35 ZB of
cold storage will be needed by 2035.” Store
it on tape to help reduce expense and protect
the content long-term.
Data analytics, artificial intelligence, video
surveillance, and cloud all have big data
requirements with extended retention times.
The report explains that, “A combination
of cloud and tape can help to achieve best
practices in digital preservation for the
long-term by providing IT managers with
three copies of data, on two different media
types and one offsite. INSIC further notes:
“Organizations with on-premises tape also
have control of their data and the option
of abandoning cloud or switching cloud
providers rather than paying exorbitant egress
fees.” More detail on this subject in the report.
Security amd Cyber Resiliency
Cybercrime has become a headline and a
huge headache for far too many organizations.
The report states that, “One such [cybercrime]
scheme is Ransomware, which is malware
that locks down a screen or network
until a requested payment is made to an
anonymous recipient using bitcoin. In 2022,
the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center
received 800,944 complaints, with losses
exceeding $10.3 billion. To fight cybercrime,
organizations must defend themselves with
smart data storage and security strategies.”
As previously explained, storing
copies of data on secure disconnected
‘air-gapped’ devices is paramount.
“Tape, due to its removability, enables
organizations to keep data offline
and safe to protect themselves from
disruption of service,” notes INSIC in
the report.
Technology Trends
This section of the report discusses
competing technologies, unstructured
data integration, uncorrectable bit
error rate, Redundant Array of Inde-
pendent Libraries (RAIL) when used
with Erasure Coded tape technology,
host interface and more. If you like to
‘see under the covers’ and want to
understand the technology behind
data preservation and protection then
you need to visit this section about
‘Technology Trends.
TCO & Sustainability
The cost of storage alternatives is important for
storage managers to plan, budget and manage
data access, preservation and expense. The
report examines cost considerations from a
variety of viewpoints including Total Cost of
Ownership (TCO), energy consumption, and
cost trends. TCO is the first consideration that
is discussed in the report: “The TCO of tape
has been demonstrated across multiple use cases, most common amongst these
is active archives and deep archives
of data.
Tape is most cost effective where
infrequently accessed multiple
Petabytes of data exist.” The bar chart
shows 20 PB stored for 10 years, with
no data expansion, 1% data retrieval/
egress per month. “The model yields
outcomes that are very similar to other
TCO tools. HDD is 2.5x and S3
glacier is 5.9x more expensive than
the tape solution.” See the full report
for additional scrutiny on TCO and
energy consumption.
