I know, I know -- "tape is dead" stuff is silly, really. It's just that with the tidal trend towards disk-based backup, tape tends to get lost in the media shuffle. But that doesn't mean that some major vendors aren't working on new tape R&D. In fact, IBM's tape storage revenue actually rose 9% in 2005. The reason? Those petabytes of backup have to go somewhere, and they're not going on disk anytime soon. Data Storage Today reports on the phenomenon:
Researchers at International Business Machines Corp. say a new method for cramming data onto magnetic tape will increase storage capacity at least 15 times, enough to squeeze the text from 8 million books onto a cartridge half the size of a VHS tape.
Hitachi Maxell is getting into the act too with an upcoming release of DLTtape S4 media, which a native capacity of 800GB (yes, that's native -- 1.6 TB compressed) and a native transfer rate of 60MB/s. You've still got tape's disadvantages; it's easier to recover from disk. But for large-scale storage for DR purposes, nothing else beats big-ass tape.
