Indispensable for backup and archiving

Tapedrives

The development of new technologies and the growing demands of data-driven companies have gradually replaced the use of tapedrives with that of disk and cloud storage. And yet it is the multinationals which seem to be bringing about a U-turn in the use of tapedrives. Did you know, for instance, that the major media players use tape storage to stream their content? A tapedrive is indispensable for this.

TAPEDRIVE: PROVEN TECHNOLOGY

Let’s start with a brief technical explanation. A tapedrive is a device that makes use of magnetic tape to store computer data. The data can then be read and deleted. The current generation of tapedrives is completely aligned with linear tape open (LTO) technology. Compatibility issues do not arise because a tapedrive supports LTO tapes up to two generations ago.

When tapedrives read and write data to storage media, they do so differently from hard disk drives (HDDs) and solid state drives (SSDs). Tapes store data sequentially, whereas HDDs and SSDs transfer data by means of rotating disks with rapidly moving seek heads, non-moving flash memory or similar technology. The tapedrive is a robust solution, given that the lifespan of disks noticeably decreases as they are used.

TAPE LIBRARY: GIGANTIC CAPACITY

Tapedrives come in different shapes and capacities. One tapedrive with one tape is sufficient to write the entire backup of a small to medium-sized company to tape in one go. If you need more capacity, to store an audio-visual archive of national cultural and historical material, for example, then a tape library is an ideal solution.

A tape library is a system in which a robot arm moves the tapes from a storage location (slot) in the library to the built-in tapedrives and vice versa. The number of slots in a tape library can easily be expanded in stages. Large industrial, media, scientific and construction organisations are prominent users of tape libraries with substantial numbers of slots, sometimes as many as 100,000. In other words, there would be no bulk storage of data without tapedrives.

THE POWER OF TAPE STORAGE AND TAPEDRIVES

Increasing storage capacity

The technological progress of LTO tapes is producing bigger and bigger volumes of storage capacity. The new generation of tapes (LTO 9) offers capacity of 18 TB native to 45 TB compressed data. The most recent roadmap of the LTO programme now contains a 14th generation with storage capacity of 576 TB native up to 1.44 PB (petabytes) compressed data.

Reliable and fast

When it comes to solutions for data storage, tape technology is noted for its reliability. On average, tape is less error-prone when reading and writing data than other storage media. Furthermore, the reading and writing speed of a tapedrive is now higher than that of a hard disk.

Sustainable solution

Where data on hard disks is immediately accessible, data on tape is slightly delayed because the tape has to load first. However, the fast access to a hard disk is only possible because its ‘engine is running’. From a global point of view, the amount of energy needed in a data centre to keep the disks running is doubled by the amount of energy needed to cool these disks. Tapedrives do not need this, which implies lower energy costs.

TAPEDRIVES: STATE-OF-THE-ART EQUIPMENT

Tape storage including tapedrives remain an important part of organisations’ IT infrastructure due to their huge storage capacity, reliability and sustainability. They help organisations to make secure backups and archive their valuable business data. Backupned is happy to assist its customers in this. We do so by making use of equipment that is the ‘Rolls Royce among backup and archive systems’: a reliable and modern platform with which Backupned offers a wide range of customers the best possible service.