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Tape Summit Predicts Tape Renaissance: Page 5 of 5

All in all, Tape Summit speakers talked at length about LTFS and the benefits it would provide. Notably many of the vendors had been at NAB and spoke about the heightened interest of the broadcasting industry in using tape with LTFS capabilities. One particularly cogent example regarded workflow archiving! I thought that the words "workflow" and "archiving" would be an oxymoron, but I was wrong. Through every step of the production and post-production process in modern film production, tape can and does play an essential role.

Tape innovation would seem to be another oxymoron but as we have seen, it is not. I have tried to keep vendors out of this discussion (so as not to favor one over another) but I will at least mention some. First, though, two organizations that promote tape -- the Active Archive Alliance and the LTO Consortium -- were well represented. Among the companies that I talked with were:

  • Crossroads -- in addition to its monitoring and analysis capabilities of tape, it plans to exploit LTFS to provide network-attached tape file storage
  • Gresham -- its strength is in the management of tape in a TSM environment
  • HP -- tape continues to be a focal point, and it is strongly promoting the use of LTFS
  • IBM -- a strong user of LTFS and a prime mover in expanding tape management automation
  • QualStar -- it has long supported active archiving with its archive management software in tape environments
  • Quantum -- tape management automation and using tape for an active archive (StorNext) have long been capabilities of Quantum
  • Spectra Logic -- it has long been an innovator in tape and has just introduced new data verification capabilities for tape
  • Tributary -- a strong supporter of an integrated VTL (which it calls a backup virtualization layer) that uses tape at the back end.

The real story I took away from the Tape Summit was not disk versus tape. Random access devices, whether HDD, SSD, or some other random-access technology, will always have a vital role in enterprises and the growth of random-access storage continues to have a bright future. But once again the reports of tape's death have been greatly exaggerated.

No, the real story is that the ability to deal with not only the explosion of growth of information, but the need to retain much of it for longer periods of time now has a far more economically feasible answer. That should relieve the pressure and stress of storing humongous amounts of still useful information for the long-term.

And that should tend to spur the information revolution on, as budget dollars can be allocated to meeting other tasks than just paying an ever-increasing storage bill. So long as tape lives, IT is the real winner.