SONY

Sony aims for greater eco-efficiency in its business activities

Tape storage is moving back into strong focus as the preferred medium for use in data archives.

Whilst disk has rapidly become the medium from which to restore recently backed up files, tape has unrivalled attributes of vast capacity, scalability, long lifespan, very low cost per gigabyte, zero energy consumption when offline and thus exceptional environmental credentials making it the clear preferred choice for archiving data & long-term back-up.

Over the recent past the amount of digital data being generated has grown astonishingly. Part of this is due to more regulation with business data having to be kept longer so as to satisfy regulatory and compliance concerns, for example, Sarbanes Oxley and the European Union Data Retention Directive. More data has been and is being generated in vast amounts as previously analogue media files for sound, images and motion pictures, move to digital formats.

Business is also continually generating more operational data as well as the constant and growing flood of e-mails. Then there is the steady expansion in the use and capability of hand-held intelligent devices. There has been a widely publicized IDC report (1) which calculated that the amount of information created and copied was 161 exabytes in 2006. IDC predicted that this would surge to a virtually unimaginable 988 exabytes in 2010 - an exabyte being one billion gigabytes.

This data has to be stored and its important core has to be stored for a very long time, twenty or thirty years or more. That is where tape comes into its own because into this area disk fears to tread.

References
1. IDC: White Paper An IDC WHITE PAPER A Forecast Of Worldwide Information Growth Through 2010.
Sponsored by EMC, March 2007.