Categories: Data and Information ManagementData archiving and preservationData protectionGreenInfrastructure Resource ManagementIT Industry ActivityIT Infrastructure Topics

Did someone forget to tell Dell that Tape is dead?

Did someone forget to send a memo to Dell that magnetic tape is dead, or, perhaps pre-occupied with other activities? Maybe no body at Dell read the “virtual” or “fictional” memo that tape is dead?

Ok, enough with the cynicism and joking around, tape is not dead (See recent Computerworld and Dell story) and Dell is one of several vendors including IBM who still find time to talk about tape as part of a solution to different customer and environment needs.

Sure, tape might be in or heading into its golden years or what can also be called the plateau of productivity (for customers) or profitability (for some vendors), tape does not get the marketing dollars and media coverage as its been around as a technology for a long time and their are cooler and niftier (techno term) things to discuss including disk based backup and data protection, CDP, VTLs, de-dupe debates, clusters, grids and clouds, FCoE vs. iSCSI, NAS, SAS, virtualization, OSD and pretty much anything except tape.

However, the reality is that many organizations, particular larger organizations still use and rely on tape based data protection for backup/BC/DR as well as archive for compliance and non-compliance data retention or data preservation activities, in some cases complimenting and co-existing with disk based solutions.

Disk to disk (D2D) based backups and data protection certainly continue to gain adoption and deployments in both large and small environments, however, the shift to disk based data protection, or, clinging to tape with a death grip does not have to be, nor should it be an all or nothing value proposition, that is, they can and do co-exist for different uses and purposes leveraging the various economics and benefits of the technologies to address various tasks and requirements.

New and emerging technologies certainly need to be discussed, dissected, developed and deployed as they are the future for maintaining and sustaining business growth via IT service delivery in economical and reliable fashion, that is, apply what technologies makes economic and business sense at a given point in time to minimize risk while maximizing useful benefits to your business.

Ok, nuff said.

Cheers gs

Greg Schulz – Author Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking (CRC Press), The Green and Virtual Data Center (CRC Press) and Resilient Storage Networks (Elsevier)
twitter @storageio

greg

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View Comments

LTO says:

December 23, 2008 at 9:44 am

thanks for sharing such a nice informaton

Reagrds,
tape4backup.com
AT4B3
- Greg Schulz says:
  
  December 23, 2008 at 3:16 pm
  
  LTO thanks for the comments and glad you found the information of value.
  2009 is shaping up to be the year that many will jump on the "Tape is still alive" bandwagon or at least until they have some other bandwagon to jump on. This does not mean that the tape sector is a growth business; however it is also far from being as dead as some would have us believe.
  
  While in some sectors tapes usage continues to decline, in other sectors tape deployment and use is flat if not rising. What?s also interesting is that with increased capacity per density footprint, this indicates more data being stored on tape than in the past.
  
  Like it or not, tape is going to be around for awhile at least in larger organizations at least until disk based solutions including those with de-dupe can address the scalability with stability challenges to support large scale backup and restore without introducing performance bottlenecks.
  
  Here's a link to another post about tape's changing role if you are interested, also check out some of the articles and tips at http://www.storageio.com.
  
  Cheers - gs