During the first day of joining Sun, I was given a book to read (Storage Spectrum) so I could become more fully aware of the board spectrum of storage solutions and technologies in the industry. This book has it all for storage. Last week I attended a conference and listened to Fred Moore, President of Horison,Inc., the author of this book, and one of the industry's leading storage experts. As I listened to his topic “Tape – The Digital Curator of the Information Age,” he reminded us of the inherent advantages that tape has in the industry over disk beyond the cost advantage (Clipper Group stated that disk is about 23X more expensive than tape as recently as February, 2008). I left the presentation with a re-enforced vision and enthusiasm that there is an excellent future for tape, which I have known for decades.

In Fred's presentation he also reminded us that his topic refers to critical and invaluable content that are 1) fixed, 2) needs to be preserved for archive and compliance reasons for decades, and 3) should be stored on a green technology to avoid huge power and cooling costs because this data is infrequently accessed.

So why am I optimistic about the future for tape? Because the Digital Curator needs to be able to perform the following functions:

• Store this invaluable content for decades. Tape can easily meet this requirement based on the current reliability of the technology and media, warranted up to 30 years. What about disk? Maybe up to 6 years. Conclusion, tape is the long life media.
• Provide portability of this invaluable content. This is another significant attribute of tape but not so for disk. Can you easily move disk hard drives? No. But what happens to the data if you lose power? With tape you can readily move your content remotely without electricity. Not so easily accomplished, if at all, with disk. Conclusion, tape media is portable and can be moved without electricity.
• Store this inactive content so it does not consume electricity. That is another easy accomplishment when your data is on tape but not so easily accomplished, if at all, when your data is on disk. Conclusion, tape is green. According to the same Clipper Notes referenced above, disk consumes about 290X more energy than tape.
• Store this content securely. Encryption is readily available for your tape data but not so for disk data. Conclusion, tape media can easily be secure.

Tape is superior to disk for all of these requirements. So what does this all mean? Tape is the logical choice for Digital Curator.