Tape Storage: Dead Men Still Walking

Below is an analysis from Robert Amatruda, Research Director in IDC’s Storage program, covering the tape hardware and removable magnetic storage markets

Tape Storage: Dead Men Still Walking

This past week, no less than four tape storage vendors announced new products and renewed alliances. This was quite a week for an otherwise staid and mature segment of the data storage market. For many years now, vendors in the data storage industry have been pronouncing a death sentence for tape with: low-cost disk, virtual tape libraries, data de-duplication, and high-density optical products. Furthermore, storage vendors have built entire marketing campaigns singing the demise of tape – its final epitaph.

In fact, tape is not dead. The tape storage market continues to be a multi-billion dollar industry and is a large contributor to the bottom-line financial results of storage vendors such as HP, IBM, Sun, Dell, and Sony. Admittedly, the tape storage market is not fast growing. It’s declining and consolidating in some segments, but robust and growing in other areas, particularly in the tape automation market. The announcements this week proves that the tape market is worthy of more investment and tape vendors are still innovating with new, high-capacity, low-cost products.

The big news was IBM and breaking the 1TB barrier with new iterations of their proprietary enterprise tape drives. Providing customers with products that store 1TB of uncompressed data on a single tape cartridge will help them manage and improve their ever-increasing data storage needs in a very cost-effective manner. Large datacenters especially will benefit from these next generation products since they can reuse tape cartridges already in use that were purchased for earlier generations of those drives.

In yet another announcement, HP and Sony jointly are developing a sixth generation low-end drive based on the DAT or Digital Data Storage (DDS) standard – called DAT 320. The HP and Sony drives are aimed at their large installed base of SMB and remote office customers that have used DDS/DAT drives for quite some time. The HP and Sony drives will be able to store 160GB uncompressed on a single tape cartridge. The DAT 320 drive, with a capacity point much smaller than the enterprise drive offerings from IBM and Sun, addresses the needs of cost conscious customers that have always benefited from DDS/DAT drives.

Or research tells us that many customers, large and small, still rely on tape storage for backup, archive, and data-protection. Tape is a cost-effective storage medium to add incremental capacity as customers need it. Also, in the era of Green IT, tape fulfills a critical part of the computing infrastructure. Tape is proven to be very green with low power consumption.

It is interesting to note that the maximum hard disk drive capacity is likely to be 1.5TB this year, with a roadmap to 2TBs and beyond. There is no doubt that these larger HDDs are necessary as digital content creation continues to double at least every two years. All this data at some point needs to be archived and saved for scores of years, and tape has long been the preferred choice of mediums to do just that.

The tape industry is alive and well, and vendors have robust development road-maps for higher capacity products in the years to come.