Comments on: Tape is dead, long live tape

By: nicol

nicol — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 09:45:06 +0000

what’s the shelf life / durability of powervaullt rd1000,dell?

By: RenewData takes a single swipe at tapes — Storage Soup

RenewData takes a single swipe at tapes — Storage Soup — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 15:23:59 +0000

[...] Even as we continue to debate whether or not tape is dead, indicating at least that its salad days are probably behind it, some of the most interesting innovations in tape technology I’ve seen are happening right now. [...]

By: Izak De Beer

Izak De Beer — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 12:13:24 +0000

To me there is still a huge requirement for tape, if you look at the disaster recovery requirements etc, not all SMB clients or even enterprise clients can afford to have offsite disk replication for recovery purposes, so in saying this it still makes sense to have the clients active data on disk and a copy on tape offsite maybe with collocation to increase restore times and the inactive archive data on tape offsite, depends on your policies.Makes sense to me at this point.

By: Marc Farley

Marc Farley — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 17:07:37 +0000

Taylor, the only way I know of to play an MP3 backwards is with a digital audio editor that lets you flip it around. I didn’t know there was a backwards thang in The Wall.

By: Taylor Allis

Taylor Allis — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 21:20:48 +0000

Marc - I do have to give you kudos for one thing in your video however. The Pink Floyd tape. I’m a long time fan, The Wall is a work of art. And yes, I first listened to it on record, then tape, then CD and now on SSD/Flash. I do have one complaint however - there is a backward message in the album that you could get to by playing the record backwards. I haven’t figured out how to do that on my iPod yet - but nowadays I probably have better things to do…

Cheers, Taylor

By: Taylor Allis

Taylor Allis — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 21:06:01 +0000

Hi Marc - ok, fair enough - I’ll answer your question!

As an individual: I am not using tape. My laptop is backed up to a Maxtor drive and my home Mac is backed up to an external LaCie drive.

My business: My network server, wiki content, shared org data, etc. is stored on disk and backed up to tape.

Our customers: Use tape as a storage tier for their data protection and archive needs. They pay us close to a couple billion a year for our tape products and services; and about 11 exabytes of data is sitting on Sun StorageTek tape.

To add - I do think the new Dell RD1000 is pretty darn cool, I may even look at it for individual use. But if you were to store the above mentioned 11 exabytes on 240GB cartridges at $199.99 - it would cost you $9.2B…

By: Marc Farley

Marc Farley — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 18:44:55 +0000

Taylor, Did I say tape is dead? OK, there was probably some small implication, but I was really asking for examples of how it was being used. For me personally, its dead, but that’s just for my own needs as an individual. You almost answered my question, but not really. So I’ll ask again - what are you using tape for?

By: Beth Pariseau

Beth Pariseau — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 13:29:20 +0000

//Disk is the new tape, and tape is the new microfiche.//

Really interesting analogy. I hadn’t thought of it that way before.

By: The circle of media life « Storage Effect

The circle of media life « Storage Effect — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 13:00:35 +0000

[...] Beth Pariseau at Storage Soup asks if tape is finally dead. Back in 2000 when I worked at StorageTek, that was the mantra from EMC, and we took it personally. There was lots of life left in tape then, and still is yet today. [...]

By: Pete Steege

Pete Steege — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 12:34:07 +0000

Tape is alive and kicking, but its reason for being was continued to shift right to steadily more dormant data. Meanwhile flash will be taking on the disk applications with the highest performance and lowest capacity needs.

Disk is the new tape, and tape is the new microfiche.