Most IT professionals, at least those over thirty, were probably introduced to tape as part of the backup system. For years tape drives and libraries have been the primary repositories for backup data, most recently with the LTO (Linear Tape Open) format. In the past decade, however, disk-based backup has largely replaced the use of tape. But in some industries and use cases tape has been doing just fine, first as a long-term archive medium and then as a way to transport and share large file data. In 2014 tape is poised to re-emerge in more mainstream IT environments and non-backup use cases, thanks to the explosion of unstructured data and the proliferation of the cloud. For IT professionals, there are five takeaways from 2014 that help explain how tape has pulled off this comeback. # 1 – Tape is not dead While its role in backup has diminished, tape for archive is growing. For the last several years tape has been ‘living large’ in the Media and Entertainment (M&E) space – these are the broadcast companies that have enormous archives of digital content and the companies that make software and all the technology to create that content from raw video files. Even before the cloud companies M&E was dealing with petabyte scale data sets and tape was their go-to technology. Tape also provided a way to easily move large files around in an organization and to share files across platforms and between companies. With its ability to hold […]

Source storageswiss.com