Warning: Rumors Of Tape's Demise Greatly Exaggerated

By The Business Solutions Network

Earlier this year, I would have predicted that 2012 would have been the year tape media made the same transition that film-based picture cameras made a few years ago.  At a couple of trade shows I attended, storage vendors offered up analyst stats that further confirmed this hunch, with some claiming “42% of data restores from tape fail” and others claiming that number to be as high as 71%.  Further adding to the tape demise theory is the fact that disk-based backup is growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of nearly 17% per year, according to a recent report from IDC.

There's another side of this argument that doesn't get as much press, that you should also be aware of:
1. While it’s true that tape automation sales have dropped off since 2007, an IDC study reveals that tape sales have flattened out over the past couple of years and are expected to remain flat through 2015.

2. Even though tape library sales are flat, tape capacity continues to double every few years. For example, LTO-1 tapes, which came out in 2000, had a native capacity of 100GB. Today, LTO-5 tapes have a native capacity of 1.5TB.

3. Those stats I cited earlier claiming as much as 71% of data restores from tape fail are really just urban legends, baseless accusations falsely attributed to Yankee Group and Gartner, according to W. Curtis Preston, an expert in backup and recovery systems and CEO of TruthinIT.com, a media outlet dedicated to educating the IT community about the technologies most appropriate to solve their problems... Check out my 3-minute video blog to hear the rest of the story.