The Preannounced Death of Tape

I'm doing series of articles on tape technology, and during the research phase found more than a little of the "tape is dead" rhetoric. When you hang around storage journalism, you hear the death knell for tape at least once a year. One commentator referred to tape as "yesterday's technology." I'd dismiss it for the hype that it is, but too frequently it has the feel of the new innovator dismissing the older observer as hopelessly old-fashioned. The first message should be, then: don't change your existing tape solutions just to be trendy, or to be considered "up to date." Being up to date with storage can last a few months at best. In 1952, the RAMAC from IBM held 5 megabytes...and had this suspect thing called "random access." United Airlines didn't buy that early RAMAC to be trendy...they bought it to be useful. For the first time, you could get flight information quickly and conveniently.

You don't buy or keep tape solutions to be trendy, you buy or keep them to be useful. Storage administrators understand that much corporate data is only accessed infrequently. Yet storage volumes are multiplying each year as corporations generate more electronic content and struggle to meet complex business transactions, regulatory compliance mandates, and e-discovery requirements. Expanding storage on the storage area network (SAN) simply by adding expensive fiber channel disks is typically not a cost-efficient option.

Tape cannot be dismissed as yesterday's technology if it solves today's business problems. Tape subsystems conserve power in the power-stressed data center. It is removeable to other sites, protecting essential information in case of a natural or man-made cataclysm. (The buzzwords are business continuity and disaster recovery.) Data centers can scale with extra tape cartridges rather than more drives, in most cases. Tape's cost continues to be competitive.

Just because a technology stands the test of time doesn't make them timed out. Like the old Monty Python sketch where the death carts were trying to collect a body during the Black Death: "I'm not dead yet." Neither is tape in the data center.