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Tape Summit Predicts Tape Renaissance: Page 3 of 5

The second question is: why hasn't the data been archived? There are a number of answers. For one thing, an archive implies the need for good data retention management policies, something that is difficult for many enterprises to achieve. Suffice it to say that data retention has been scarce, except perhaps for some deep archiving that was typically performed on tape.

But does tape have to be limited to deep archiving? Quantum and Qualstar have products that use tape in conjunction with disk caching for an active archive. Nevertheless, active archives typically reside on disk.

The gauntlet was laid down by Molly Rector, Vice President of Product Management and Worldwide Marketing of Spectra Logic, who said that 5% of data is active production data, 15 to 20% could be active archive data that, for performance reasons, needed to be put on SATA disks, and the rest is active archive data that could be put on tape. (Some of the data may be deep archive data, but it is probably a small percentage of the whole.) This was a shocking comment, implying that most of the data in a data center should be on tape! That will, of course, generate a lot of controversy, but, if true, would lead to a renaissance for tape technologies and vendors.

But can it be true? What are the economic benefits and can tape do the job?

The Clipper Group has published a white paper entitled "In Search of the Long-Term Archiving Solution -- Tape Delivers Significant TCO Advantage over Disk"  This paper discusses the long-term preservation of digital data and comes to the astonishing conclusion that a disk-based solution costs 15 times that of a tape solution! This is a well-reasoned paper with the assumptions clearly laid out. If the results of this paper stand (and they very well may), then tape has a very strong TCO case for archiving data.