Taping over?

At the SNW Powering the Cloud event in Frankfurt, the tape vs disc debate reared its head again. Hannah Breeze went along to see if one side is gaining the upper hand

The metaphorical sounding of a death knell is a common occurrence in the IT industry, with fast-emerging technology trends driving once cutting-edge predecessors into an early grave.

And in the realms of storage over the past few years, tape has become the latest victim of the technology wheel of fortune, with disc-based storage hot on its heels and keen to hail itself the solution of the future.

But at the SNW Powering the Cloud conference in Frankfurt last month, tape vendors were determined not to go down without a fight, claiming that the technology was just as prepared for the future as its flash counterparts.

So with vendors on each side keen to defend their corner, what does the future really hold for the two types of storage, and is there room for the technologies to coexist?
According to figures from 451 Research, in the first half of 2012 more than half of large organisations were already using flash in some form within their datacentres, and the analyst predicts that in the next five years all mission-critical applications will use the technology.

Bill McGloin, practice leader for storage and data optimisation at Computacenter, said flash is playing a big role, but that tape is far from down and out."Flash is really close to my heart, and when big data kicks in, you will need to have to analyse data in real time, so there will be a need for high-performance storage, which means a real demand for flash," he added."We are seeing tape's role now to be less for primary backup, and a move to disc has been seen here; tape has moved down the food
chain slightly."

However, while the role of tape is changing, it continues to have an important part to play, as vendors continue to write software that is tape-compatible, added McGloin, who said this proves there is a future for the medium.

Big data analytics and the growing amounts of increasingly rich media put more pressure on storage requirements and new disc-based innovations are well equipped to deal with the surge, he said. However, while new trends add additional pressures to storage requirements, they do not negate the need for more traditional storage functions, such as archiving.

Diamond anniversary
Speaking to CRN in Frankfurt, Steve Mackey, international vice president of tape vendor Spectra Logic, claimed archiving is still a popular market for his firm, despite people thinking the medium of tape is outdated.

He said: "People think tape is old-fashioned. It is a 60-year-old technology, so it is very mature. However, this does not mean it is redundant, despite there being perception issues around this. A lot of people are suddenly interested in archiving now, and tape offers that solution, so there is a lot of interest."

He added that accommodating large amounts of data is not a new issue for storage, as media companies, research bodies, universities and the automotive industry have all been producing such volumes for years, and successfully storing their data on tape archives.

Simon Robinson, research vice president for storage at 451 Research, agreed that although the landscape for tape has changed dramatically over recent years, there is still a role for it to play in the future.

"Flash is the future of storage, and in that respect, tape is the past," he said. "The tape industry has had to get used to the fact that the role of tape has changed. Your daily backup 10 years ago would go to tape, but this has disappeared entirely and is where the industry has suffered. A lot of those who supplied into that market have seen revenue fall off a cliff.

"However, although EMC likes to spend lot of time talking about the death of tape, the reality is that it resells tape systems from vendors. The most vehemently anti-tape [company] still acknowledges there is a role for it."