- Fact No. 1: Costs Less Overall
- Fact No. 2: Easier to Manage
- Fact No. 3: More Reliable
- Fact No. 4: More Capacious
- Fact No. 5: Tape Can Be Used for NAS Functions
- Fact. No. 6: Tape Works for Long-Term Recordkeeping
- Fact No. 7: Tape Remains in Heavy Enterprise Usage
- Fact No. 8: Multibillion Dollar Overall Market
- Fact No. 9: Amount of Data Kept on Tape Is Growing, Not Declining
- Fact No. 10: Emerging Markets Are Adopting Tape
Fact No. 1: Costs Less Overall
Linear Tape-Open-5 (LTO-5), a tape format used mostly for large workloads, costs up to 15 times less than Serial ATA (SATA) disks for long-term storage of large volumes of data. Total cost of ownership for physical tape systems is approximately two to five times less than Virtual Tape Libraries (VTL) with de-duplication for backup operations.
Fact No. 2: Easier to Manage
A single administrator on average can manage up to 100 terabytes of disk data or up to multiple petabytes of data on tape.
Fact No. 3: More Reliable
Individual tape media cartridges are two to four orders of magnitude more reliable than SATA disk drives. A National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) study reported that automated tape systems have a proven reliability of more than five 9’s (99.999 percent).
Fact No. 4: More Capacious
The largest disk drives currently store 4TB, verses the highest-capacity tape, which stores 5TB (10TB compressed).
Fact No. 5: Tape Can Be Used for NAS Functions
Active archive applications and Linear Tape File System (LTFS) technology enables tape to be used as network-attached storage.
Fact. No. 6: Tape Works for Long-Term Recordkeeping
Automated media health and data-integrity verification mitigates concerns about long-term data access.
Fact No. 7: Tape Remains in Heavy Enterprise Usage
Tape remains in heavy use for enterprise backup. According to Gartner, 78 percent of respondents in their most recent research use tape, typically for either disk-to-tape (D2T) backup or disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T). (Gartner Group, 2011)
Fact No. 8: Multibillion Dollar Overall Market
The size of the tape market in 2011 was more than $2.2 billion—for just the tracked market revenue on drives, library automation and open-system media. This does not include the additive software ecosystems or proprietary enterprise media revenue. (IDC/SCCG, 2012)
Fact No. 9: Amount of Data Kept on Tape Is Growing, Not Declining
The amount of data stored on tape is expected to have a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 45 percent from 2010 through 2015. (IDC, 2010)
Fact No. 10: Emerging Markets Are Adopting Tape
Tape is being quickly adopted in emerging data-intensive markets. In a 2012 study of technology deployments for big data applications, Intersect360 Research found that 35 percent of respondents already are using tape as part of their storage infrastructure for big data.