It’s Prime Time for Tape for Secondary Data Storage

Big data, artificial intelligence, machine learning, video surveillance, and social media are among some of the biggest trends in the technology industry driving the creation of massive data sets that need to be managed and retained.

A new report from the Tape Storage Council: Tape Is Primed for The Rise in Secondary Storage, looks at the current data growth and economic factors driving the demand for advanced solutions to effectively contain Petascale and Exascale requirements. Many organizations continue to store this data on more costly to operate HDDs (hard disk drives) which require constant power and cooling to maintain reliable operations.

However, as digital data creation continues to grow at 25% or more per year, at least 80% of the world’s digital data is lower activity data optimally suited for secondary storage. Secondary storage is persistent storage designed to keep less critical and less active data on more economical, secure storage mediums that don’t need to be accessed as frequently as data on primary storage.

In response to this challenge, the tape ecosystem has significantly expanded its capabilities in recent years. LTO tape capacity continues to increase as new magnetic particles like Barium Ferrite and Strontium Ferrite will help to scale tape areal density for decades to come and current roadmaps signal that the trend of steady tape innovation will continue well into the future. It’s time to rethink existing data storage practices and take advantage of advanced magnetic tape for delivering the most sustainable, cost effective, highly scalable, and reliable mass storage systems.

For more information the ransomware-resilient, long-term data archiving benefits of tape storage and to download the full report, visit https://tapestorage.org.