Is Tape Dead?

Is Tape Dead?

Mark Twain got a call from a newspaper reporter after a story was published about his illness and potential death.? In reply, he wrote “The report of my death was an exaggeration.”

And the same is true of those who think magnetic tapes are dead.? After all, the use of magnetic tape for computer data dates back to the UNIVAC supercomputer in 1951.? But are they a relic of the past…or the way forward?

When I started Save My Data, I promised we’d learn about data villains and data heroes.? Turns out magnetic tape…in a much more advanced format than the picture above…is a real data hero.

I interviewed Patrick Mayock of Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) for this article.? He made some great points about modern day tape (known as LTO tape).? And I’ve added some of my own.

• A single LTO cartridge, the current generation LTO-9 can hold up to 18 terabytes of data.
• There are currently plans to take LTO to generation 14 (LTO-14), when a single LTO cartridge could hold 576 terabytes of data.
• Hard drives can be expected to last 3-5 years, and yet tapes, when stored correctly, can last up to 30 years.
• Tapes have a lower error rate by far, when compared to disk drives.
• Tapes can be ejected and stored remotely, unlike hard drive storage.? This is known as an “air gap.”? If hackers break into a company’s network, they can’t get to offline, and offsite tapes.
• And for all of us who talk about the Cloud, Amazon and Microsoft use huge amounts of tape, with tape libraries that hold over 50,000 tapes in a single robotic library.

The coming storage crisis:

A recent study showed that each day on Earth we generate?500 million tweets,?294 billion emails,?4 million gigabytes?of Facebook data,?65 billion WhatsApp messages?and?720,000 hours?of new content added daily on YouTube.

To put it in more perspective, consider these statistics:

• At a 50% annual growth rate, around 150 years from now the number of digital bits would reach an impossible value, exceeding the number of all atoms on Earth.
• While we’re not yet to that point, tape is providing a critical need, offering high-capacity , low cost, environmentally friendly, storage for all the data we create…and create…and create.

Is tape dead?? Far from it!? Tape is great for so many companies.? One of them just might be yours.

Use the link https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/patrick-mayock/ to reach Patrick Mayock and learn more about HPE and LTO Technology.

To learn more about how Verified Backups makes your backup process safer, visit https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/chris-marshall-verified-backups/ or get on my calendar at https://verifiedbackups.as.me.