Is Tape Ready for Production?

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MyPictureOver at Storage Switzerland, George Crump writes that three key factors are making tape an attractive, viable alternative for production use cases today.

As we describe in our article “What is LTFS?“, LTFS turns tape into a mountable file system. In loose terms you can think of it as a USB hard drive, just with a lot more capacity and in a form factor that’s safe to ship around the world. Solutions like those from CrossRoads Systems, IBM, Quantum, etc. all bring LTFS to libraries and add a NAS front end. Spectra Logic’s DS3 as we covered in a recent webinar, ”Driving Down the Cost of Forever”, allows tape to be accessed via a RESTful API. This means the cloud providers with experience in REST programming can access tape from within their applications and not have to integrate complicated SCSI commands. Being able to access tape as easily as you access any file system means that it could be viable as a repository for a lot of production data that does not need instant accessibility. Or it could be used in workflow driven environments where data access requirements are predictable.

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