Tape revival

Tape has re-invented itself as a fast, high-capacity storage medium during the last few years. Tape technology has become indispensable as the only viable and affordable means of accommodating the sheer magnitude of information that the worlds' businesses, governments and organizations needs to store in a safe way.

Figure: The information explosion

Information explosion

Data stored per person grows by 60 % in the western world and 30 % in total each year, and the growth rate is increasing. The scientific community and the health care industry are two examples of the information explosion.
 
The National Center for Atmospheric Research alone generates 1920 TB of information every year from its satellite and computer modeling weather-tracking activities. The storage requirements for experiments on CERN's nuclear particle accelerators are measured in petabytes, with an estimated new storage requirement of 12 PB by 2006. In healthcare, new imaging technologies and scanning techniques also present new challenges for the storage industry. A single magnetoencephalography (MEG) scan, which effectively combines MRI and EEG scans, will produce10 GB. 
 

Security and legislation

Just a few years ago, tape was considered ancient, losing to the new, less durable but cheaper Serial ATA (SATA) disks, which were demmed easier to use and cheaper by many customers unfamiliar with tape drives. Today, in a complete reversal of fortunes, tape has taken center stage as the medium for archive storage with higher volume capacity, lower media cost and faster data rates than most disk drives. Mounting legislation to prevent accounting fraud, as well as new compliance regulations in financial services and other industries, have made it very clear that disk is not a viable option for maintaining vast, impregnable stores of information. And tape is the only viable solution for storing the astronomical volumes of data generated. 

New and advanced tapes

New manufacturing and recording technologies have created a durable, lightweight, high-capacity, high-performance medium that is perfect for today's automated archive libraries. It is everything but low-tech. A lot of science and intelligent machinery goes into making a tape drive. It is a precision-engineered product that involves a complex manufacturing process subject to rigorous quality control and an exhaustive test program.  

Disk-to-disk-to-tape backup

"Magnetic disks are being used increasingly with tape to backup the primary system disc. The disc is utilized as the initial backup target.  Files are retained on the disc for a short to moderate time in the eventuality a restore operation is required.  The principal advantages of discs used in this manner are their fast performance during the backup and restore processes.  Files are later moved to tape for long term storage if required.  This two-stage process takes advantage of the speed of the disc drives during backup and restore with the economy of tape to store large amounts of data over long periods of time." *)
 
As part of a multi-level data protection model, tape is the ultimate last resort in the seamless movement of data based on its value. As data becomes less relevant to day-to-day business operations, it can be shifted downwards onto less costly storage media such as tape. WORM tape fulfills the need for tamperproof, compliant data storage, without the high cost of optical disks.  This Multi-level protection maximizes the benefits of all storage media—with tape as the ultimate last-stop.

*) Freeman reports July 2006