Most businesses today use LTO-based tape.Īnd, while tape systems remain relatively expensive to buy – an issue especially for smaller businesses – the incremental cost of adding capacity is far lower than on a disk-based array. But tape storage has no theoretical limit, as long as the user has a robust system for managing and storing the cartridges. Hard drives and solid-state storage continue to fall in price, and capacities have now reached 16TB per disk.
Cost advantageĬost, too, is an advantage for tape. If tape storage is managed well, it should avoid cross-infection by ransomware payloads. Online or nearline systems are vulnerable to the same malware that targets core production systems. Increasingly, organisations are also turning to tape because it offers a fairly high degree of protection against ransomware.
A completely separate data store is resilient against problems caused by code errors or other problems with production applications. This air gap is one reason tape continues to find favour with storage and disaster recovery experts. The way tape operates, with the data separated from the read/write mechanism, creates a natural “air gap”.
Tape is uniquely suitable for offsite storage, as the media itself is lightweight and more robust in transit than the hard drive. These are applications where offline storage is an advantage, rather than a disadvantage. Magnetic tape has been around since the 1950s, yet it’s still a key component of data backup and recovery, and archiving.