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Tape Industry Synopsis - 2008
Unit shipments for automated tape libraries are expected to grow between 5 and 10 percent annually through 2010 as long-term archival, fixed content, entertainment and compliance storage requirements escalate worldwide. Five different tape formats comprise nearly the entire market; 8mm, DLT/SDLT, LTO, half-inch cartridges and helical scan. The tape suppliers are trying to regain customer mindshare in tape storage as newer offerings have eliminated many of the previous concerns. Marketing activities from tape suppliers remains weak and non-aggressive compared to their disk drive competitors and many customers have an outdated view of the capabilities of today's tape solutions.
Magnetic tape industry revenue has declined slightly since the middle of 2001 when the global economic downturn began, but the reduction has been much less than that of the disk industry as revenues went from $4.5 billion to $4.0 billion during this period. Tape library shipments are expected to increase between 5 percent and 10 percent through 2010 while revenues are projected to grow slightly. The highly successful integrated virtual tape architecture from the mainframe market has gradually made its way into the much larger Unix, Windows and Linux markets, delivering higher cartridge utilization and improved backup and recovery performance though this opportunity remains relatively untapped. The LTO recording format has gained clear leadership in the midrange market and is offered in most all midrange tape libraries while two companies, Sun Microsystems (formerly StorageTek) and IBM, share the entire half-inch enterprise and mainframe tape drive, media and library market.
Capacities for tape cartridges have been increasing faster than disk drive capacities and are quickly approaching 1 terabyte native capacity, having already attained the 800-gigabyte native (1.6 terabyte compressed) level with Quantum's SDLT format. Given this trend, automated tape is expected to maintain its price-per-gigabyte advantage over disk for the foreseeable future. Tape systems are nearly infinite in scalable capacity and are the greenest of all storage devices.
Media life, once a concern, now ranges from 15 to 30 years for the new enterprise and midrange cartridges making them an effective replacement for aging removable media. Drive MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) rates now approach 400,000 hours for enterprise-class tape drives. Though SATA disk, virtual tape, and de-duplication schemes are becoming the preferred backup solutions for non-mainframe systems, tape will continue to play a role in backup and recovery. A key application for tape systems will continue to be providing point-in-time backup copies of data for extended periods of time, but the real growth areas for tape lie in fixed content, compliance and archival storage.
Source: Horison Information Strategies: Storage Navigator
© 2005 Horison
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