Tape backups were once the gold standard for data protection and archiving, but with the rise of affordable disk and cloud storage, many wonder if tape still has a place in the modern data center. While tape may seem like outdated technology, it actually offers unique benefits that continue to make it relevant for some use cases today.
What are tape backups?
Tape backups, also known as tape drives, are data storage devices that write data onto magnetic tape. Tape is wound onto reels or cartridges and can be accessed sequentially for reading and writing data. Tape has been used for data storage since the 1950s, with formats evolving from large open reels to smaller cartridges and cassettes.
Compared to hard disk drives (HDDs), tape has historically offered greater capacity for offline storage and archiving. Modern tape cartridges can store up to 60TB uncompressed, or up to 192TB compressed. Tape libraries automate the process of accessing and managing numerous tape cartridges and drives.
What are the advantages of tape backups?
Here are some of the key advantages that tape backups offer compared to other storage media:
- Greater capacity: Single tape cartridges can store huge amounts of data, from 10s to 100s of terabytes.
- Lower cost per GB: The price per gigabyte is much lower with tape than HDDs or SSDs.
- Long-term retention: Tape can store data for 10-30 years if stored properly.
- Air-gapping: Tape provides an offline, isolated copy of data that is physically separated from the network.
- Energy efficiency: Tape cartridges consume no energy when not being accessed.
- Durability: Tape media has a bit error rate up to 3 orders of magnitude better than HDDs.
- Portability: Tape cartridges are small and lightweight for easily transporting large data sets.
In summary, tape offers very low cost, high capacity storage for infrequently accessed data that needs to be retained and preserved for long periods of time. The isolated, offline nature of tape also provides an added layer of protection from cyberattacks.
What are the disadvantages of tape backups?
Tape also has some downsides that can make it less ideal for some use cases:
- Slow sequential access: Tape is slow for random access and restoring small numbers of files.
- Vulnerable media: The physical tape media is vulnerable to damage, degradation over time.
- Manual intervention: Tape libraries may require manual tape changes and maintenance.
- Upfront costs: Tape drives and autoloaders have high upfront capital costs.
- Format obsolescence: As technology changes, tape formats may become obsolete over decades.
- Restoration complexity: Restoring from tape to disk can be complex and time consuming.
In general, tape is not well-suited for everyday access and fast restores. The logistics around tape make it impractical for primary or active archives that need frequent access.
What are the main use cases for tape backup?
Here are the most common use cases where tape backup continues to thrive today:
- Offsite data storage: Tape is ideal for keeping an offline copy of data at a remote site for disaster recovery.
- Archival storage: Tape provides inexpensive, long-term storage for archiving aged data that rarely needs access.
- Backup: Tape is a cost-effective media for regular full backups, especially for large data sets.
- Compliance: Mandated data retention policies for financial and healthcare industries are met efficiently with tape.
Essentially, any cold data that will be rarely accessed and needs to be retained indefinitely is a perfect use case for tape backup storage. Storing a copy offsite meets disaster recovery objectives.
Who still uses tape backup?
Here are some of the industries, companies and organizations that continue to rely on tape backups today:
- Mainframe users: Banks, government agencies and other mainframe users often backup to tape.
- Healthcare: Hospitals and medical centers use tape for data retention compliance.
- Financial services: Brokerage firms, insurance firms and banks use tape for regulatory requirements.
- Scientific data: Research institutions archive scientific data sets to tape.
- Education: Universities use tape to backup administrative and research data.
- Film/media: TV, film and music studios archive raw footage and recordings to tape.
- Cloud providers: AWS, Google, Microsoft Azure offer cloud tape storage services.
While tape adoption has declined in recent years, it still remains firmly entrenched in many organizations handling large amounts of data. Tape likely won’t disappear anytime soon given its unique strengths around high capacity, long-term data retention.
What are the tape backup technologies?
The main tape technologies today include:
- LTO: Linear Tape Open is an open tape format released in 2000. LTO-8 is the latest generation with 12/30TB raw/compressed capacities.
- Oracle T10000: Oracle’s enterprise tape drive with up to 96TB raw capacity per cartridge.
- IBM 3592: IBM’s enterprise tape with jaguar technology. Stores up to 60TB raw.
- DEC TK: An older DEC storage tape able to hold 50GB uncompressed introduced in 1984.
LTO is currently the most popular tape backup solution on the market, providing a good balance of capacity, performance and cost.
| Tape Type | Capacity (Native / Compressed) | Data Rate |
|---|---|---|
| LTO-8 | 12TB / 30TB | 360 MB/s |
| Oracle T10000 T2 | 8.5TB / 22TB | 252 MB/s |
| IBM 3592 | 10TB / NA | 200 MB/s |
| DEC TK70 | 2.1GB / 4.2GB | 1.2 MB/s |
What does the future look like for tape storage?
While tape has steadily declined in use over the past decade, most experts believe tape will continue to play an important role in the data storage landscape for years to come. Here are some predictions for the future of tape:
- Increasing capacities: Tape cartridges will continue to grow in capacity thanks to new techniques like barium ferrite and nano layering.
- New use cases: Object and cloud storage tiers could take advantage of tape for cold storage.
- Long term retention: Compliance and archival storage needs will sustain tape demand.
- LTO roadmap: The LTO format has a defined roadmap for growth up through LTO-12 (144TB raw).
- New competitors: Sony and Fujifilm are exploring future tape formats to compete with LTO.
- Tape libraries adoption: Automated libraries will continue replacing outdated manual tape handling.
While niche, tape is expected to continue serving long-tail cold storage needs. Higher capacities and lower costs will help keep tape relevant into the foreseeable future. However, competition from cloud archives could potentially threaten tape adoption long term if costs continue to decline.
What are the alternatives to tape backup?
As tape has declined in popularity over the years, several alternatives have emerged including:
- Disk backup: Direct backup to disk using external HDDs or NAS appliances.
- Cloud storage: Backup and archival storage using public cloud services like Amazon S3.
- Object storage: Disk/flash based storage systems optimized for backup repositories.
- Optical discs: Blu-ray discs can store up to 300GB for small archives.
- Magnetic disks: High capacity portable HDDs for backups and archiving.
- Solid state storage: All-flash storage arrays provide low latency backup targets.
Disk and cloud storage tend to be the most common tape alternatives used today due to better accessibility and restore speeds. However, they still fall short of tape in terms of costs for infrequently accessed data at petabyte scale.
How do you determine if tape backup is right for your data?
Here are some key questions to ask when determining if tape backup makes sense for your specific use case:
- How frequently will you need to access the data on the backup media?
- What volume of data are you backing up? Terabytes, petabytes?
- Do you have compliance or regulatory requirements for long term data retention?
- What are your recovery point and recovery time objectives for data restores?
- Do you need portability to transport backups offsite?
- Does your IT staff have the bandwidth to manage a tape backup system?
- What is your budget for backup storage acquisition and ongoing management?
If your data will rarely or never need to be accessed, tape likely makes sense from a cost perspective. The more data you need to retain for compliance reasons, the more tape can help drive down your long term storage costs. For petabyte scale archives, tape remains extremely cost competitive with disk and cloud solutions if data access performance is not a high priority.
Conclusion
While tape backup is no longer the default storage choice it once was, it continues to offer unique benefits that keep it relevant for cold data use cases. The economics of tape make sense for large data sets that need infrequent access, long term retention, and portability for disaster recovery. As long as regulatory requirements exist for storing data over decades, and as long as data continues to explode in volume, tape backup technologies will likely endure as a niche yet critical component of the data storage landscape.