Tape Storage Carves a Role in E-Business

As the infrastructures that are needed to run electronic businesses become more complex, the ability to store and access large volumes of information is becoming increasingly important.

But as the need for storage capacity and data warehousing continues to mushroom, cost-conscious companies are becoming wary of spending large sums on expensive disk-based storage systems--especially for seldom-accessed data--and are instead looking to tape-based systems.

"Companies are going to get to the point where they have so much data, much of which isn't being recalled that often, and they'll have to ask themselves, 'Do I really want to keep it on spinning-disk forever or do I want to store it on the cheapest manner possible?'" says Dave Hill, an analyst at Aberdeen Group, in Boston.

But analysts also warn that tape cannot yet replace disk storage: Although one extra trick of tape storage devices is that they can be used as virtual hard drives, Hill suggests keeping tape off the front line of a company's network.

"Tape is sequential, and the access time is not that fast," Hill says. "So you don't use it for real-time transactions, for example."

Hill says the real strength of tape lies in its reliability in mirroring copies of network data and its immunity to viruses.

Viruses generally go after resident data on the system, Hill says, and therefore can't attack data stored on tape. Tape also ensures against accidental deletions, he added.

"Tape has to be a part of your choice for any storage decision, because backup and restore is fundamental, you can't put together an IT organization if you don't do storage well," Hill says.

Invented in the 1950s, tape storage systems "historically have not been as reliable as people would like, and they haven't had the performance that people would like so [tape vendors] are trying to upgrade," Hill says.

In the same way that disk storage recently underwent a revolution, a wave of recent upgrades to tape storage technology and the development of a new interoperability standard, LTO (Linear Tape Open), has opened the lines of communication among tape vendors in an effort to provide heterogeneous operation and backward-compatibility across proprietary tape storage platforms. Similarly, the rival DLT (Digital Linear Tape) standard is also being enhanced to give that format higher levels of storage.

Tape storage media have been used in isolated "islands" during the past 50 years due to what Brenda Zawatski, vice president of removable media solutions at IBM's Storage Systems Division, sees as a lack of cohesive industry vision for tape storage and the unglamorous perception of tape as being an archaic solution.