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“Tape Still Used Quite a Bit for Backup.”

Said Fred Moore president, Horison Information Strategies

tape,Moore, Horison Information StrategiesFred Moore president, Horison Information Strategies, a storage industry analyst and consulting firm, send us this article in reaction to our comments on a press release from the LTO consortium:

 

 

As an independent analyst and consultant, I also track the overall storage market and was intrigued by the article of March 23 titled 76,000PB LTO Compressed Capacity Shipped in 2015 and wondered if you had considered the following in your analysis?

Today LTO is no more used for backup but for archiving only, in competition with Blu-ray, but with two disadvantages,” you wrote.

In reality, tape is still used quite a bit for backup and the growing backup trend is to use tape for the second backup copy that may often be located offsite.

The biggest growth area for tape is in archive, big data reservoirs, and long-term storage retention requirements as media life is no longer an issue with all new enterprise tape (Oracle-STK and IBM) and LTO media having media life >30 years.

With the Active Archive concept, a disk buffer is placed in front of the tape library as a cache making subsystem performance much higher for backup/recovery, archives and big data/analytics reservoirs. This trend is gaining momentum as archives don’t stop growing.

There still remains a market ‘hang-over’ from the late 1990-2005 timeframe when tape was in decline suffering from the justifiable poor perception of a variety of load, thread, edge, media life and head wear issues mainly from DLT, 8mm, Travan, DDS, AIT and QIC. The tape industry has done an ineffective job educating the overall storage industry on their progress and as a result many people have a very out dated view of tape.

Tape infrequently competes with Blu-ray in today’s data center storage market. The Facebook pilot test of Blu-ray however is the most visible example and left most storage analysts stunned and scratching their heads in disbelief.

Blu-ray has – by far – the lowest reliability of any storage product with a BER at 1×1012, FC and SAS HDD have a reliability of 1×1016, flash SSD is at 1×1017 and LTO and enterprise tape are now at 1×1020. With 7 orders of magnitude less reliability, Blu-ray is not a very reliable place for storing valuable data given the other options.

Tape’s slow average access time of 50-60s is actually 47-50s. Blu-ray access times are 66-80s by comparison. Robotic pick times are 5-10s today for tape or Blu-ray.

The uncompressed data rate for LTO-7 is 300MB/s compared to Blu-rays 8.58MB/s data rate ~ 35x higher. Who would ever want Blu-ray for such a slow recovery operation?

Native enterprise tape capacity is 10TB (25TB compressed), LTO-7 is at 6TB (15TB compressed) and Blu-ray is at 100GB. It takes between 60-250 times more Blu-ray discs to contain the same amount of data that a tape cartridge does. That’s a huge media count to label, backup, protect, archive and manage and increases management costs and TCO.

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