The Tape Storage Council (TSC), a collaborative industry group of which Spectra is a founding member, released their annual memo, “Tape Takes Aim on Unprecedented Data Growth” this November. The report highlights current trends, usages and technology innovations occurring within the tape storage industry and what these developments mean for the overall data storage market.

Tape Has the Greatest Potential to Address Soaring Capacity Demand

The chief idea in TSC’s newly released memo is that tape’s sustained expansion in its offerings and reach uniquely position tape technology to address key storage-intensive challenges, including cloud storage, High Performance Computing (HPC), the expanding number of hyperscale data centers, storage requirement growth in entertainment, surveillance, and the rapid emergence of the IoT and edge computing. Having been fueled by more than a decade of significant technological development, tape’s steady technology improvements continue to give tape the lowest cost, highest capacity, fastest data transfer rates, and most reliable storage medium available, with the reliability of tape three orders of magnitude better than the best HDDs.

Noteworthy advancements in the tape storage industry highlighted in the memo include:

• IBM’s TS1160 enterprise tape drive
• Tape Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculators
• Improvements to tape file access time and data rate increases
• Ongoing push from media manufacturers for developments in density growth
• Extended LTO technology roadmap

Indeed, Spectra has continued to advance the tape industry with recent technological advancements such as TAOS and Swarm,  while at the same time, expanding its tape library family with offerings such as Spectra Stack and the Spectra T950v (a lower end model of the popular T950 Tape Library).  Unique to Spectra is its ability to customize the outer panels of its largest tape library, the TFinity ExaScale, enabling IT professionals the opportunity to showcase the importance of their organization within the data center.

Compelling technological advancements have propelled modern tape to drive reliability, capacity, and data rates to the highest levels in the storage industry, making it the most cost-effective, long-term storage solution available. The technology continues to provide the industry’s most dependable way to address cybercrime and ransomware – the value of the tape air gap in cybercrime prevention has provided a distinct advantage over other mediums. Tape serves multiple roles for the rapidly expanding hyperscale, enterprise, internet, and cloud data centers as tape capacity can more easily scale without adding more drives. Roadmaps signal this trend of steady technological innovation to continue well into the future.

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