Categories: Data and Information ManagementData archiving and preservationData footprint and proliferation reductionData protectionData securityGreenI/O NetworkingInfrastructure Resource ManagementIT Industry ActivityIT Infrastructure TopicsmetricsPerformance and CapacityPower and CoolingStorage and Storage Management ToolsStorage Architecture and Access

Industry Trends and Perspectives: Tape, Disk and Dedupe Coexistence

This is part of an ongoing series of short industry trends and perspectives blog posts briefs.

These short posts compliment other longer posts along with traditional industry trends and perspective white papers, research reports, solution brief content found at www.storageioblog.com/reports.

The topic of this post is a trend that I am seeing and hearing about during discussions with IT professionals pertaining to how tape is still alive despite common industry FUD.

Not only is tape still very much alive with recent enhancements including LTO5 with an extended range roadmap, it is also finding new roles. In addition to being deployed in new roles, tape is coexisting and complimenting dedupe or other disk based backup and data protection approaches and vice versa.

Hearing tape is alive in the same sentence as dedupe deployments continuing may sound counter intuitive if you only listen to some vendor pitches.

However if you talk with IT customers particularly those in larger environments or with VARs that provide complete solution offering focus you will hear a different tune than tape is dead and dedupe rules. Tape is still alive however its roll is changing. Watch for more on this and related topics.

That is all for now, hope you find this ongoing series of current and emerging Industry Trends and Perspectives interesting.

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