Tape Drive Technology Comparison

As data continues its steep growth trajectory, the requirement for physical capacity has fueled tremendous advances in the primary storage industry (hard drives and hard-drive-based subsystems). The successes of large disk suppliers such as EMC and Network Appliance have been the result. One often overlooked piece of the storage boom is the effect that this growth, and surrounding issues, including compliance and energy use, have had on removable media— specifically, tape.

Of the types of removable storage, tape has dominated and is still the hands-down leader in most categories. These include cost-for-capacity category and low energy cost per GB of data stored—after all, a tape on a shelf or in a library slot doesn't use any energy. The archival lifetime of tape for storing data securely, maintaining the date's integrity, is also unmatched, with an archival life of 30+ years. Thanks to these advantages, multiple tape technologies have been promoted—and out of this crop, LTO the overwhelming leader.

This white paper looks at today's tape technologies for all sizes of organizations, excluding only the very low-end that are not suitable for business and organizational storage. This white paper reviews proprietary Sun/STK and IBM drives, which up until recently were considered enterprise, but are now competing relatively poorly with LTO. LTO effectively serves the enterprise, as well as mid-range organizations. LTO's advantage is, in part, due to its costeffectiveness; the proprietary drives are simply not cost-competitive.

Regardless of the specific tape brand, tape drive technology is built on some common principles, which are implemented differently across the choice of tape technologies. Note that all of the drives reviewed are typically used in automated tape libraries.