Our U.S. Tape Summit 2012 was another huge success. Thank you to all our tape vendors and participating press, analysts and writers. Check back on this page for information on our European Tape Summit 2012 being scheduled for Fall 2012.
In the meantime, here is an example of a direct result of our Tape Summit – this group was formed at our summit in 2012.
2012 Tape Market State of the Union Memo (click link for full attributed version)
On May 16, 2012 representatives of tape storage providers BDT, Crossroads Systems, FUJIFILM, HP, IBM, Imation, Iron Mountain, Oracle, Overland Storage, Quantum, Spectra Logic and Tandberg Data issued the following memo to set the record straight on the current trends, usages and overall health of the tape industry.
While many organizations already know tape for its traditional uses – backup, disaster recovery and compliance – most probably don’t realize that modern applications now enable tape to be used as an active file archive and as low-cost NAS storage for latency-tolerant data. For access to large quantities of stored data, tape’s role in big data, cloud, HPC and IT operations is expanding dramatically. These markets take advantage of the integration of tape’s historical benefits (cost-effectiveness and media longevity) and new innovations (data integrity verification and file system interfaces) to use tape to protect large data sets.
Explosive data growth and shrinking IT budgets are putting pressure on companies to find innovative storage solutions to meet their organizational demands. Increasingly that means tape, thanks to its significant cost advantages, reliability, and continued innovations improving tape’s capacity, speed, and ease-of-use.
Cost of Ownership
· LTO-5 tape costs up to 15x less than SATA disk for long-term archive of large quantities of data[i]
· TCO of tape solutions is approximately 2-5 times less than VTL with deduplication for backup solutions[ii]
· A single administrator on average can manage up to one hundred terabytes of disk data or up to multiple petabytes of data on tape[iii]
Greater Reliability
· Individual tape media cartridges are 2-4 orders of magnitude more reliable than SATA disk drives[iv]
· NERSC study shows automated tape systems have a proven reliability of more than five 9’s (99.999%)[v]
Innovations: Greater Capacity, Speed and Ease of Use
· Largest disk drives stores 4 TB[vi] vs. largest tape, which stores 5 TB (10 TB compressed)[vii]
· Active archive applications and LTFS let tape be used as NAS storage[viii]
· Automated media health and data integrity verification mitigates concerns of long-term data access[ix]
These facts, coupled with the continued, rapid growth of data, have made tape increasingly important. According to IDC, the midrange and enterprise tape market is expected to grow over the next several years. Further, “As part of the continuing digital data creation explosion that is well documented, the amount of data kept on tape is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 45 % from 2010 through 2015.”[x] Additionally, 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% of respondents already are using tape as part of their storage infrastructure for Big Data.”[xi]
Based on the latest research from 2011/2012, a few facts for the record:
• Tape remains in heavy use for enterprise backup, as 78% of the respondents use tape, typically either disk-to-tape (D2T) or disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T). Gartner Group – July 2011 [xii]
• The size of the tape market in 2011 was more than $2.2 billion dollars 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 revenues. IDC/SCCG – 2012[xiii]
Over the past few years many of the facts around tape storage have been misquoted or misunderstood. For example, Dave Russell, Gartner analyst, has pointed out “continued misquotes re: Gartner and tape failure rates”[xiv] in a recent discussion with Curtis Preston. Please join us on May 16 for a discussion with the tape storage group to discuss tape’s role in the data centers of 2012 and beyond.
Sincerely,
Representatives of the Tape Storage Industry
#tapestorage
| Dan JanBDT, Sales and Marketing Manager | Jim TramontanaIBM, Program Director, OEM Storage Marketing | Peri GroverOverland Storage, Director of Product Marketing |
| David Cerf Crossroads Systems, EVP Business & Corporate Development |
Craig Conti Imation Corporation, Director, Global Product Line Management |
Eric BassierQuantum, Director of Marketing |
| Peter FaulhaberFUJIFILM Recording Media USA, Inc. Senior Vice President | Jeremy SurattIron Mountain, Sr. Solution, Marketing Manager | Molly RectorSpectra Logic, EVP Product Management & WW Marketing |
| Simon WatkinsHP Storage, WorldWide Tape Product Marketing Manager | Tom Wultich Oracle, Director Tape Product Management |
Marije Gould Tandberg Data, Vice President of Marketing |
