| ||||||||
| ||||||||
Current Filter: >>>>>> Tape: on a roll? Editorial Type: Opinion Date: 11-2013 Views: 2909 Key Topics: Storage Tape Cloud Backup Key Companies: Quantum Key Products: Key Industries: Education Health | |||
| Not for the first time, rumours of 'the death of tape' have been greatly exaggerated, suggests Mark O'Malley, strategic marketing manager, Quantum
Despite the merchants of doom, tape has not - as expected - died the death which was predicted. Instead it's fought gamely against other storage solutions and has, quite nicely, stood the test of time. Tape undoubtedly plays a pivotal and expanding role across a wide variety of industries including media, education and healthcare, and organisations are continually seeking longer-term storage and data retention solutions. The tape debate and obvious misconceptions continue to baffle.
A MISCONCEPTION INTENSIFIED So is there a future for tape in the market? It's true that in the last couple of years we've seen the demand for tape as near-line storage decline, but if there really was no use for tape, then why would we - and others - spend time investing in the technology's development? Because tape is still highly valued for archiving purposes and as the need to archive and store data increases, the need for tape does too.
TAPE'S GOT GAME Furthermore, where content is king and ultimately being driven by the consumer in many industries, tape stands up strong. The media industry is just one example of this, and broadcasters, production and post-production facilities alike simply can't live without it. As we see more and more content and data generated from HD cameras, and the growing focus on being able to re-monetise content in different ways, storing everything on disk simply isn't feasible from a cost standpoint. Take Poland's leading pay-TV provider, nc+ as an example. It currently has 200 TB of disk available for archiving, but also has a huge 1.5 PB of archived content, which they expect to grow by another petabyte in the coming year. As a result, they've opted for a tape library specially optimised for big data environments. Storing this content with the right data storage solution, has now become more important than ever. But it's not just media. Let's quickly consider how tape is being used across other industries. Sectors such as intelligence, oil and gas and life sciences view tape as essential for storing and protecting the data volumes they generate. Researchers dealing with genomic sequencing data have to move it off disk quickly after it's generated in order to make space available on disk for more data. It's imperative to have access to raw data to be able to re-work or re-analyse initial findings, so this data still needs to be available for researchers wanting to work with it months or even years later. You can see similar scenarios in many industries; data is captured; readily available to be accessed fast and instantaneously during its early life; then stored to be used again later on.
Page 1 2 | ||
Like this article? Click here to get the Newsletter and Magazine Free! | |||
Email The Editor! OR Forward Article | Go Top | ||
PREVIOUS | NEXT |