My focus today is to provide you with an easy to find collection of white papers and other documents that show the value of tape and virtual tape libraries in both open and mainframe environments. I provided you with a subset of this content back in January and believe it is time to provide you with an update:

Mainframe Storage Solutions Remain Best in Class. The latest paper by Fred Moore – Learn about the roots of enterprise computing from the mainframe perspective and find out more about Sun's newest mainframe storage offerings.

The Market Opportunity for Enterprise Tape. Which tape drive technology should you choose? Enterprise-class tape technologies are equipped with reliability features for the 24x7 high duty cycle requirements of today's data center. This IDC white paper presents the case for enterprise tape technologies and why not all backup applications should be treated equally.

Tape The Digital Curator of the Information Age by Fred Moore – Tape won’t go away, but its role is expanding from a pure backup solution to that of a premier long-term storage technology.

Tape Technology Leaps Forward in The 3rd Era by Fred Moore – Contrary to some general perceptions, many improvements have occurred in the tape industry recently. This paper details 3rd Generation tape technology developments, including longer media life, significantly improved drive and library reliability, higher drive duty cycles and much faster data rates than any previous generation of tape technology.

Using Tape Virtualization to Improve Backup Performance by Taneja Group – Virtual tape technology is arguably the easiest way to introduce disk into a tape-based backup infrastructure, to improve backup performance and reliability. This paper considers current data management considerations and provides a quick review of Sun's tape virtualization solutions.

Blending Tape Virtualization and Data Deduplication To Optimize Data Protection Performance by Taneja Group – "Green" concerns are on the rise as data growth continues to spiral out of control, raising both environmental and budgetary challenges. Tape virtualization alone has very positive impacts on operational issues in data protection, but it also provides access to storage capacity optimization (SCO) technologies like compression, single instancing, and data de-duplication that can offer additional advantages in the right kinds of environments.

Combining Storage Capacity Optimization and Replication to Optimize Disaster Recovery Capabilities by Taneja Group – In this Solution Profile, Taneja takes a closer look at the combined use of VTL, replication, and SCO technologies to address DR requirements, discussing the pros and cons associated with the deployment of these technologies in tandem.

Disk and Tape Square Off Again - Tape Remains King of the Hill with LTO-4. This is a paper written by Clipper Group that provides excellent insights to the cost differences between disk and tape of the same capacity. This paper found out that tape was up to 23x lower in cost and up to 290x lower in energy costs. Tape is truly a green technology.

The Truth about Tape - Nine Myths to Reconsider. There are myths about tape that need to be dispelled. This Clipper Group paper identifies nine of those myths and provides you with an updated view of tape. Also, since this paper was published in February, 2007, the reality of tape's usage and developments have further improved the case for tape. This is supported by other papers referenced in the complete list provided in this entry.

If you have documents that provide additional insight to the value of tape or virtual tape library, please let me know.