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Tape Archiving Sees Upturn, Helped by Big Data

Rumors of the demise of tape-based archiving have been greatly exaggerated. What’s fueling the renaissance in tape? The common belief is that tape is fading away gradually. That held some truth until 2009, but the last couple of years have seen a major tape renaissance. According to the research firm Enterprise Strategy Group, the use […]

Written By

Drew Robb

Nov 9, 2011

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Rumors of the demise of tape-based archiving have been greatly exaggerated. What’s fueling the renaissance in tape?

The common belief is that tape is fading away gradually. That held some truth until 2009, but the last couple of years have seen a major tape renaissance.

According to the research firm Enterprise Strategy Group, the use of tape now dominates archiving over internal disk, external disk or cloud. Further, tape’s lead is expected to grow during the next five years, demonstraing 45 percent compound annual growth by 2015.

“Deduplication made it look bleak for tape for a while, but the market began expanding again in 2009,” said Molly Rector, chief marketing officer for Spectra Logic.

She names growth areas such as archiving, regulatory compliance and disaster recovery. Google, for example, lost 0.9 percent of its mailboxes due to disk-based replication corruption. Those mailboxes were recovered from tape.

Migrating From Tape to Tape

The Media and Entertainment vertical has become another strong zone for tape as broadcasters and others migrate content from video tape to digital formats. Medcom, for example, is a media organization based in Panama. The company needed a great deal more storage when Sony announced the end of life of the Betacam video tape format, and management decided to introduce HD programming. It adopted a Spectra T950 tape library to back up and archive 370 TB of video files.

Read the rest about the renaissance in tape-based storage at Enterprise Storage Forum.

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Drew Robb

Drew Robb is a contributing writer for Datamation, Enterprise Storage Forum, eSecurity Planet, Channel Insider, and eWeek. He has been reporting on all areas of IT for more than 25 years. He has a degree from the University of Strathclyde UK (USUK), and lives in the Tampa Bay area of Florida.