Tale of the Tape: Musings on IBM’s 35TB Tape Announcement

Tuesday, January 26th, 2010

A recent tweet by Chris Mellor from The Register caught my eye. He highlighted IBM’s recent development of a 35TB tape. Here are four articles on the topic: Engadget FUJIFILM Announcement The Register Article A blog post by Robin Harris at ZDnet My thoughts It is interesting to see IBM/Fuji driving tape development. With this ...

Musings on the Spectra Logic T-Finity Announcement

Tuesday, November 17th, 2009

Last week Spectra Logic unveiled the T-Finity, a new high-end tape library that is one of the largest and most scalable units in the industry.  The system can grow to 30,000 tape slots and 480 drives and it creates some interesting questions. As data backup and recovery SLAs have become more stringent, ...

Streaming LTO-5

Friday, August 14th, 2009

Chris Mellor (twitter:@Chris_Mellor) recently posted an article over at The Register about LTO-5 entitled Is LTO-5 the last harrah for tape?.  He makes an interesting point about the future of LTO and whether LTO-5 will be the last generation of the technology.  Most of the comments on the article disagree ...

W. Curtis Preston on physical tape

Thursday, April 9th, 2009

W. Curtis Preston recently wrote an article on the state of physical tape for SearchDataBackup. He talks about the technologies that backup software vendors have created technology to more effectively stream tape drives. As I posted before, if you cannot stream your tape drives, their performance will decline ...

The Fallacy of Faster Tape

Thursday, November 6th, 2008

I often talk about disk-based backup and virtual tape libraries (VTL) and wanted to discuss physical tape. While VTLs are popular these days, tape is still in widespread use. LTO tape, the market share leader, continues to highlight increased density and performance. Do not be fooled with ...

Tape is not dead!

Thursday, August 21st, 2008

I am amazed when I hear some vendors aggressively promote that tape is dead. It seems that hyping the demise of tape is in vogue these days and the reality is quite different. Even so,  there is no stopping them from sharing their message with anyone who will ...