The Role of Tape Technology in Managing the Exponential Growth of Cold Data

The increasing need for data storage capacity due to enormous amounts of newly created data year after year is an endless story. However, budgets for data storage are not nearly increasing at the same rate as data capacity growth, while retaining the data still remains very important. In consequence, having an inexpensive but reliable storage solution is paramount for this situation. Fortunately, most data generated is "cold data", which is rarely accessed but still needs to be retained for quite a long period of time. Tape storage, which has a long proven history with applications in various industries, is suitable for retaining such cold data because of its low TCO (total cost of ownership), advanced performance, high reliability and promising future outlook compared to other candidate technologies for cold storage (e.g. HDD, Optical Discs).

In this presentation, we will go through the reasons why tape storage is suitable for retaining cold data and will present the latest tape technologies and future outlook.

Learning Objectives

What is cold data?
Tape's advantages in cold storage
Latest tape storage technologies
Future outlook of tape storage