SMB - fastest growing segment for tape storage

NEW DELHI: With data becoming the lifeblood of today's digital organization, storage solutions

remain a top priority in IT budgets because the integrity, availability and

protection of data are critical to business productivity and success. As the

amount of data grows, it's not only the big enterprises but also SMBs that are

now positively looking at tape driven storage solutions. Zia Askari of

CyberMedia News spoke with David Rogers, who is manager product marketing of

tape products business segment at Hewlett Packard's network storage solutions

about the way tape storage industry is moving forward.












Q. Today, storage needs are quite often dictated by customers and their
priorities towards storing critical data. Can tape cartridge capacity keep pace

with disk drive capacity growth?






A. Nearly 40 percent of SMBs do not have any back up for their data. This is a
trend that came off from a recent study comprising of some companies in the US

and UK. Two things are going to drive future growth for us. One is surely the

tremendous data growth that we see and tape drive capacity is going to lead

hard drive capacity. Moreover the cost per megabyte is also coming down. So

when you buy a drive - you can add capacity to it according to your needs.












Q) Will tape storage continue to be less expensive than disk storage when we
talk about per-gigabyte basis?






A. Yes that's exactly the trend that is going to move with the industry. Tape
storage will remain cost effective. For years, tape was considered to be

cheaper than disk storage on a per-gigabyte basis.






Moving forward, the price per gigabyte of automated tape is likely to stay below
and even diverge from the price per gigabyte of disk. This will further make

tape storage a more viable, cost-effective storage solution for archive,

compliance and in the traditional backup/recovery markets not only in emerging

markets like India but globally as well.












Q. Will tape remain the preferred backup and archive technology for the near
future, given the advancements in disk drives?






A. Tape storage has come a long way - if we look at the trends, today more and
more enterprises are looking at tape when it comes to storing mission critical

data. This is surely going to continue. Even though there are advancements in

the disk drive - technology wise, but tape will certainly be the most preferred

backup and archival technology.






Tape storage has been the most popular choice for backup and recovery
applications since the beginning of the IT industry. The use of tape and disk

for backup/recovery increased after September 11, 2001. Disk mirroring, copies

one and two, is ideally used for mission-critical applications and is the

fastest way to return data to operational status from a hardware device or

subsystem failure. Restore operations using mirroring occur in just a few

seconds or less by simply pointing to a mirrored and executable copy.












Q. What will drive the future growth for tape? Will tape survive in the long
term?






A. Consolidation of data and issues related to compliance will drive major
growth for tape and storage in general. More and more organizations are now

moving towards something called as the unalterable data. There is data, which

can be changed or altered with - and there is data, which cannot be changed -

whether it is a multi national bank or a telco - huge information base is being

created on a daily basis.






Fastest growing segment for us is the small and medium business segment. This
is driven by the fact that today there are a lot of SMBs that are on their way

towards maturity when it comes to deploying IT infrastructure. This means that

SMBs are now more open to having an ERP system or a CRM system, affordability

levels of these packages have really come down now and this is leading towards

a need for affordable and sufficient storage. We see that today there is a

demand for single console management and virtual tape in backup.






The highest growth area for tape storage and the storage market overall will be
in managing growing pools of fixed content, compliance and archival data for

long periods of time.






- CyberMedia News