The fact that the tape still has a grip on the market for storage and that it probably will continue to develop is highlighted by vendors like Spectra Logic and Quantum looking at what ServerWatch has to offer on tapes. ServerWatch is a one-stop shop on news and trends related to virtualization, blades, power and cooling. Spectra Logic has been in the business for over 27 years and designs and manufactures innovative tape, disk and encryption solutions. 

Further proof of the doggedness of the tape lies in the findings of IDC. Cheryl Ganesan Lim, an analyst at IDC predicts that tape library sales will rise over the next 5 years because they offer better recovery speed. This is supported by Molly Rector of Spectra Logic who says that it would take about 2 minutes to find a file that has been deleted a year ago. Furthermore, since a tape system also verifies that data was recorded correctly, the risk of finding a blank tape is also nullified. The sales of automated tape libraries also went up by 15 % in Asia Pacific according to a study conducted by IDC.

In today’s fast paced technology world, the tape’s survival perhaps is something incredible. One of the main reasons of the tape’s longevity is the good old factor – the low cost of buying tape.

A company like Spectra Logic is looking at tapes, according to its vice President Molly Rector, simply because disk vendors cannot match up to its low cost. Putting their money where their convictions are, Spectra Logic has recently unveiled its T-Finity enterprise tape library. It has the largest storage density in today’s markets – 72 TB per square foot, provides a 44 % to 71 % improvement in data center floor space utilization has over 30,000 tape cartridge slots in a single library frame-based architecture and has been designed with an any-frame, any-location principle. T-Finity also operates on 50 % lesser power than its competition, delivers 99.99% hardware reliability since its components are designed to be fault-tolerant and redundant component.

Rector backs up the T-Finity’s powers even more by telling us that some of the customers for this tape system are NASA Ames and Argon National Labs. The company itself is the supplier of tape libraries for 7 of the top 10 supercomputers in the world. She also says that a big tape library holds back up data from disk too and today, with all the advances that have taken place in technology, tape libraries no longer have the problems of breakage and untrustworthiness.

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