The Role of Tape in Today’s Data Center
The Role of Tape in Today’s Data Center The use of tape has certainly declined in today’s data center, but it has not disappeared – much to the chagrin of some people who are self-professed “tape haters”. They simply don’t understand why should we would use tape in a modern data center rather many advanced backups available. So this latest entry in our backup basics series will explain the reasons why tape continues to be a smart choice for certain applications. The short list includes speed, cost, and data integrity – especially over long periods of time. Before saying good things about tape, it’s appropriate to mention tape’s downfall: the mismatch between a serial access device (e.g. tape) and a random access device (e.g. disk). Modern tape drives require a constant stream of data at a high speed (>700 MB/s for LTO-7) in order to function properly. Disk drives – especially incremental backups from said drives – are not capable of supplying a stream anywhere near what tape...