The future of the Tape Technology

Many customers continue to rely on tape storage to protect their business critical applications and data. The benefit to continue performing classic backup is obvious: Tape storage is cheap compared with backup-to-disk technolgies. In a TCO consideration lower cost per GB and lower energy costs are speaking for an efficient use of tape technologies, today and in the future. Of course, this arguments and the discussion about can only lead a hardware manufacturer developing and offering tape libraries and tape drives. Other manufacturers cannot offer tape and are limited to offer backup-to-disk technology only for backup and recovery, and they have no way to combine the advantages of both technologies. With the products from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), customers are well positioned to implement backup, recovery and archiving needs. HPE offers StoreEver and StoreOnce solutions to connect both worlds and technologies together.

In order to meet the increasing data growth requirements, the LTO tape technology is constantly evolving. And this year it’s that time again – LTO 7 is ready to fulfill the needs of the future. With doubling the capacity per medium it’s then possible to store up to 15 TB (at 2.5: 1 compression). Backup performance will increase up to 750 MB/s and per hour it will be possible to write up to 2.7 TB onto a single media.

Assume you need to use EMC’s Data Domain 2200 with 4 TB usable capacity and assume you could achieve a deduplication ratio of 20:1. In this case the DD2500 would fit onto approx. six LTO 7 media – with less power consumption and lower cost. So why not combining the advantages from deduplication (backup-to-disk) and the advantages of tape storage and get a better integrated solution?

Additional information regarding LTO technology or information regarding the LTO 7 press release can be found here: http://www.lto.org/2015/09/the-lto-program-announces-upcoming-generation-7-specifications-for-licensing/

External links:

• http://www.hp.com/go/storeonce – Deduplication Solutions from HPE
• http://www.hp.com/go/storeever – Tape Storage from HPE
• LTO Roadmap