In case you missed these white papers supporting the value of tape, I wanted to bring them to your attention and provide you with information on how to locate them:

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.

These and other white papers are available from the Sun White Paper Web Site.