Tape Storage Continues Upward Growth Trend at Drive Control Corporation
Overland Storage’s New NEO 600s and NEO 800s Tape Libraries as the Favoured Solution for Data Archiving and Long Term Data Retention
Distributor Drive Control Corporation (DCC) have launched Overland Storage‘s effortless data management and data protection solutions, the NEO 600s and NEO 800s. These two new additions to the popular line of NEO-S automated tape libraries are aimed at offering more choices for tape deployments in the growing tape storage market globally and locally.
According to Raul Del Fabbro, DCC Storage Division Manager, “Fueling the current expansion of the tape storage market, is an increased demand for flexible solutions designed to address rapid business data growth combined with the increasing acknowledgment of tape’s cost-effectiveness over de-duplicated disk.”
Research from analysts at Enterprise Strategy Group indicates: “Tape is the predominant storage media used for data protection due to its portability and, from an acquisition cost perspective, its price.” As tape capacities continue to out-ship disk capacities and “the use of tape now dominates archiving over internal disk, external disk or cloud… tape’s lead is expected to grow during the next five years, demonstrating 45 percent annual growth by 2015.”
Features of the NEO 600s and NEO 800s from Overland Storage
In response to the increasing demand for more long-term data storage and archiving capacity, Overland Storage has added the NEO 600s and NEO 800s to its popular NEO portfolio. NEO 600s and NEO 800s solve the complex data storage protection challenges that businesses face when budgets are limited and users demand more storage capacity. NEO 600s packs up to 216TB of backup and archive capacity into a space-efficient 6U form factor while NEO 800s provides up to 244TB in an 8U form factor, making both solutions ideal for data centers that need large amounts of storage capacity. In addition to high-capacity storage, NEO 600s and NEO 800s feature multi-drive support for increased performance, redundant power for increased data availability and remote management for ease of use and reduced administrative overhead. Utilising LTO-5 tape drive technology, NEO 600s and NEO 800s allows businesses to leverage the efficiencies of new linear tape file system (LTFS) technology, allowing disk-like “drag & drop” functionality on a tape.
Overland Storage Customers Discuss Tape Usage
Overland Storage recently conducted a survey of its customers in the United States to learn more about how they use Overland tape libraries. The results of the survey indicate that tape storage remains a vital and irreplaceable component of the data centre:
• Half of respondents say that their business could not manage without tape storage
• 56% of respondents say they keep data on disk for a month or less before moving it to tape
• 74% of respondents are using tape storage for onsite backups and 63% are using tape storage for offsite backups and disaster recovery
• 80% of respondents do not believe that archiving to the cloud will replace tape storage
Del Fabbro believes that this ongoing use of tape is mirrored in South Africa, as he finds it is still used predominantly by small to medium enterprises (SME’s) as an effective backup medium.
“There is still a very large sector in the market utilising tape for archiving and backup procedures. I cannot see it being completely phased out anytime soon,” he says.
In the larger corporates tape is predominantly being used for archiving. The corporate client has the budget to afford a more homogeneous backup and archiving solution. Enterprise clients will typically conduct backups to disk and archive the data onto tape. Tape media can be shipped off-site for long-term storage and/or retrieval and this process is extremely cost-effective.
“Industry analyst research, Overland Storage customer survey data and the overall growth in the tape storage marketplace confirm that tape-based storage remains a critical part of any data protection strategy due to its cost of ownership, portability, lower energy consumption, long shelf life, robust design and compact footprint advantages,” says Peri Grover, director of marketing for tape solutions at Overland Storage. “In response to the increasing IT demand for Overland Storage’s tape-based solutions, we’ve added NEO 600s and NEO 800s to our NEO line of automated tape libraries to provide users with additional choices in capacity, performance, features and affordability to address their data storage challenges.”
