Tape changes vendor’s storage perceptions
Cheaper than other storage methods says survey
The changing role of tape in the enterprise and how it’s changing the way major vendors are responding to new opportunities as a result, are just two of the themes that have been covered in a European “summit”.
As part of the Powering the Cloud event in Frankfurt last week, the European Tape Summit held at SNW Europe 2012, researchers uncovered research that found that the average European enterprise backs up around 90TB of data with 38 percent of these companies using tape as their main medium.
They added that the rise of Big Data analytics is set to have a huge influence on the amount of storage required and drive companies to retain more data.
According to the European Tape Audit Survey, already 53.4 percent of enterprises surveyed keep their tape data for over three years and more companies are likely to increase storage retention with the adoption of Big Data software.
This has led to a rise in use of disk arrays to replace tape for disaster recovery backups. This is partially due to disk vendors emphasising perceived speed advantages of disk and the falling cost of hard drives.
However, according to the research, 29.2 percent of companies still expect to commit over 50 percent of their data to tape in five years.
Companies at the event, which included Active Archive Alliance, BDT, HP, IBM, Quantum, SpectraLogic and Tandberg Data, also pointed out that tape-only costs are still significantly less than disk. They added that even a cent difference (per GB) at current prices meant a saving of $1,000 for the average backup size.