Tapes Have Significant TCO Benefits Over Disk

The Linear Tape-Open (LTO) Program technology provider companies, HP, IBM and Quantum, announced that two recently-released separate studies found that tape had significant TCO benefits over disk, including lower cost per GB, lower operating expenses and lower energy costs.

The two studies, from the Enterprise Strategy Group and The Clipper Group, evaluated the costs of long-term storage for various scenarios that included tape and disk as the primary storage medium. In each case, the studies found that tape had long-term cost advantages when compared to a scenario that relied on a disk-only solution.

"The notion that ‘tape is dead‘ ignores the substantial evidence that favors tape as a lower cost, environmentally friendly removable medium that is well suited for offline data protection as well as high growth compliance, fixed content and archiving applications," said Senior Analyst Mark Peters who conducted the study by ESG.

The TPC sponsored ESG study evaluated a common disk environment with an industry-standard deduplication system versus a tape library with LTO-5, with full nightly backups, over a five-year period. The scenarios included replicated systems and offsite tape vaults. In all circumstances, the TCO for VTL with deduplication ranged from about 2 to 4 times more expensive than the LTO-5 tape library TCO.

A separate study on archiving very large data collections by The Clipper Group also found that tape is much less expensive than disk, using significantly less energy when measured on a per petabyte basis over a 12-year period. In short, the TCO under The Clipper Group scenario found the disk solution for long-term archiving to be more than $67M, approximately 15 times greater than the cost to deploy a tape solution of $4.5M over the 12 year scenario with the cost of energy alone for disk at $4M and only about $18k for tape. In the end, The Clipper Group concluded that the vast majority of archived data should reside on tape.

"Tape continues to play an important role in the protection and preservation of an organization’s digital assets," said Rob Clark, Senior Vice President, Disk and Tape Backup Product Group, Quantum. "These studies from leading figures further reinforce to the industry that tape is the optimal low cost storage medium for long term data retention. LTO UItrium generation 5 capacity and performance enable highly efficient archive and data protection solutions, with all the benefits that an open standard brings."