Will Tape Storage Make A Datacenter Comeback This Year? What The Experts Have To Say Might Surprise

It’s that time of year where lots of experts reflect on the changes in the previous twelve months and examine these trends to predict what’s to come. I expect to see the following major and minor revolutions in tape, disk and cloud storage in 2011.

For the first time in years, tape will be reclaiming a leading role in the major storage market, though a confluence of technologies, requirements, economics and demand. Tape will grow in deployed capacity for data archive due to developments in:

◦Technology: The interface to data archived on tape increasingly will look just like data users access on their computer—the data will displayed through standard file systems as files and directories with the standard look and feel of pulling up any file a user might view or edit. This interface technology will accelerate tape’s move into a platform for actively used data. This method of data storage and access is widely referred to as Active Archive.
◦Economics: Active use of data stored on tape offloads expensive primary disk. File interface technology speeds retrieving data from tape, so that it takes minutes instead of hours, and makes it unnecessary to restore data from tape to make it searchable. As economic pressures continue, the affordable nature of tape will drive approximately 80 percent of all electronic archival data to be retained on tape. Tape remains the greenest available storage; it doesn’t take any power to store data once the data has been written to tape.
◦Requirements: Use of tape ensures data integrity over the long-term to meet retention requirements. Rapid accessibility of data stored on tape supports meeting e-discovery requirements, and encryption options ensure privacy in accordance with HIPAA and other legislation and regulation. As the use of tape for active data storage advances, hardware-based data verification will become standard for ensuring data written to tape archives remains accessible.
◦Demand: As the business climate remains intensively competitive, access to increasing amounts of data becomes increasingly important. Active Archive serves as an affordable and intuitive method of providing access to all of an organization’s data. At the same time, open systems storage models, will continue to overtake the market from propriety technologies. LTO will expand its market dominance.
Disk will continue its presence in data protection and archival markets through widespread adoption of SAS (SCSI-attached storage) and increasing use of SSD (solid state disk). SSD will become more commonly available in commoditized arrays with lower cost per GB. At the same time, deduplication will increasingly be implemented through applications instead of appliances. Further, X86 architectures will put extreme stress on traditional high-end storage providers by 2013.

Not more than 10 percent of the data stored in the US will be in the Cloud by the end of 2011. As users of the Public Cloud move from early adopters to mainstream users, technology and network limitations, costs, and data security pitfalls will become increasingly evident and limit the speed of adoption.

Here are Spectra Logic’s Top 10 Data Storage Predictions for 2011:

1.Data centers will be implementing Active Archives to tape as a means of offloading primary disk storage.
2.Tape will be the preferred medium for 80 percent of all data in electronic archives.
3.Hardware-based data verification will be considered a requirement in all archive storage platforms.
4.SAS disk will be replacing SATA for archive/backup storage by end of FY11
5.SSD will be arriving in commoditized arrays, dropping cost per GB, moving into a position as being the preferred medium for performance disk.
6.Dedicated Deduplication appliances will be falling out of favor. Deduplication will preferably occur in file systems and backup software applications.
7.By the end of 2011, public “cloud storage” will contain no more than 10 percent of the US data storage.
8.Lower cost disk storage solutions based on X86 architectures will put extreme stress on traditional high-end storage providers by 2013.
9.Enterprise tape drives will continue to give way to LTO based architectures.
10.Traditional backup practices will begin to shift. Data centers will begin to move to online, file-based archives for their long term data retention instead of utilizing offline backups in proprietary formats.


About The Author:
Molly Rector is the vice president of product management and marketing for Spectra Logic Corporation, where she leads channel and market development, creative and marketing communications, and product management. For over 30 years, Spectra Logic has been defining, designing and delivering innovative data protection through tape, deduplication and disk-based backup, recovery and archive storage solutions. For more information, visit www.SpectraLogic.com.