A startling set of events happened over the past few years that seemed to be missed in the industry: The tape industry developed significantly more reliable solutions.

Did you know ... ?

• tape media has significantly improved in reliability, ruggedness, and media life (15 – 30 years)
• enterprise tape drives are almost 12 times more reliable compared to the 3480/4480 vintage
• tape libraries are delivering superior performance, concurrent and non-disruptive upgrades, and higher availability due to fault-tolerance designs
• integrated virtual tape libraries provide a step function reliability improvement for the physical tape subsystem and often increase media efficiency up to 80% or more of a cartridge
• the amount of data that can be stored on a single cartridge can easily contain the content of a single disk drive
• tape drives and tape media have a longer useful life than disk products
• tape has an advantage over disk – up to a 23:1 ratio in cost and 290:1 ratio in energy.

These facts along and many other accomplishments have occurred in the tape industry over the past few years. Is it any wonder why 68% of companies currently using only disk for long-term archiving plan to start using tape and 51% of companies currently using both disk and tape for long-term archiving plan to increase their tape usage?

Customer implementation of tape is increasing for a variety of reasons. Several of the facts are provided above and I will be sharing more with you soon. Spread the word!