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Follow UsIn most organisations today, data protection management solutions are a
combination of primary storage disks, secondary storage disks, tapes and
software. Live data that must be available 24/7 is entirely different from
historical data that may or may not be accessed some time in the future, so both
tape and disk will continue to co-exist in corporate networks for many years to
come, to deal with different levels of complexity — with tape-based solutions
for backup, recovery and archive, and disk-based solutions for high-speed access
to more active data.
Tape has been the cornerstone of customers' data backup, recovery and archive
process for more than 50 years, and while industry forecasts show flat demand
for tape over the next five years, the market is still worth US $5 billion a
year, while Gartner says that four years from now, 20 per cent of all data
recoveries will still be from tape. The rumours of the death of tape are
greatly exaggerated, and major manufacturers continue to invest in different
media, including new tape-based solutions.
The events of “9/11” have had a major influence on corporate
thinking, forcing most right-minded organisations to buy the “insurance” of
disaster recovery systems, delivered on tape. Tape's portability and
durability will continue to make it a critical element of the data protection
infrastructure, and as both government regulations and business needs require
companies to store more data for longer periods of time, most companies will
continue to use tape for longer-term storage and archive
Today, tape is still the most cost-effective solution for remote and offline
storage, and tape technology continues to make rapid progress, particularly in
terms of capacity, density, performance and cost. Some tape automation
products offer 134 per cent more capacity, 1,100 per cent more speed and 595 per
cent more density compared to products launched three years ago. The cost
per gigabyte was US$4.80 three years ago, and today is down to only 50 cents.
The amount of data processed by business today is growing at an annual rate
of 70 per cent, and additional factors like cyber crime and terrorism, natural
disasters and new compliance regulations have increased the pressure on storage
— bringing into sharp focus the need for new backup, recovery and archive
solutions.