Unending Story of Tape

Chee Beng Ong,
Vice President,
Storage Sales, Asia Pacific,
Oracle Corporation

One of the most famous quotes of Mark Twain is: "Rumours of my demise have been greatly exaggerated." The quote aptly fits in the case of tape. Rumours of tape's demise have been greatly exaggerated. If some industry hype is to be believed, tape has become a thing of the past. However, tape, as a data protection solution, continues to be relevant, especially for SMEs. 

It is true that tape is being replaced for day-to-day backups by disk and online solutions, but it doesn't go away entirely. Since disk-based, online, and cloud storage and backup solutions become more cost-effective and readily available, the role of tape in the enterprises is undergoing change.  

It is said that some things do not really change in IT. The same can be said about tapes that have continued to evolve and survive as a preferred mode of storage despite significant evolutions in disks. 

It may be possible that some smaller SMBs have already moved away from tape or have never used tape at all. But in the case of larger SMBs, a hybrid of tape and other technologies is being used.  

Tape Option  

Data is growing at an unprecedented rate and this growth rate is putting extreme pressure on corporate IT departments, responsible for storing this new data.  "We have noticed that most of our customers are doubling their data every two years, but their budgets (if growing at all) are not growing at a 50% per year," says Chee Beng Ong, Vice-President, Storage Sales, Asia Pacific, Oracle Corporation.   

Not only are we required to store increasing volumes of data today, we are also required to ensure a far longer life for all the data that we store. Regulations require financial companies to keep emails for seven years or more. Healthcare agencies are required to preserve data for the life of the patient and longer. The result: storage requirements are exploding and there appears to be no end in sight. 

The other important aspect of data is the frequency with which it is accessed. While there has been an exponential growth in data volumes from the storage aspect, not all data is required to be accessed with the same frequency. The majority of this data is very seldom accessed. Enterprises are, therefore, faced with the two-fold challenge of storing huge volumes of data and ensuring optimum storage utilization to attain maximum efficiency - all arising from the need to store data for a long period of time that may be accessed with varied frequencies. 

"Not all data is created equal. As data ages, it is not utilized as often and so it makes pure financial sense to offload less accessed data to cheaper storage media. Tape is the least expensive storage media on the planet. Not only is tape cheaper to buy, but it is cheaper to own over time with 230:1 cost savings in space, power and cooling," says Ong of Oracle.  

"Bit rot" is the gradual decay of the storage media over time. In simple terms, this is about maximum shelf life. For disk, the figure is 10 years, whilst for tape, considerably long at 30 years.   

The Cost Advantage  

While disks have been undergoing evolution with prices of disk drives dropping, making disk an attractive option for some tape-based applications, the same is true for tape as well. Tape vendors continue to develop and deliver large tape cartridges, reducing the cost per gigabyte. This makes the cost differential between the tape and disk unchanged over the years. 

"Tape continues to figure significantly into IT infrastructures for high-capacity storage backup. Its unique attributes can help users manage their storage requirements and contribute to the ever-present value of tape in the storage hierarchy," says Sandeep K. Dutta, Vice-President, Storage, Systems and Technology Group.  

Reducing Energy Costs

When evaluating whether to use tape or disk as storage devices, some customers may focus on the initial acquisition costs, but fail to think about other costs, such as electrical costs, that can add to the cost of storage over several years. Storage hardware costs are decreasing every year. However, customers have few choices when it comes to electricity. They do not have the optionto go to another energy provider. The only way they can control energy cost is to choose storage wisely. 

"Power consumption continues to be a growing problem for many customers and when data is not being used, it should be on devices that consume no power... which is tape and not disk.  Even when data deduplication is taken into account, tape is still five times less than disk," says Ong.