Chris Evens from Architecting IT comments:
I read with interest Chris Mellor’s recent article on Oracle’s latest tape drive and it got me thinking. In the mid 1990′s I was doing some work for StorageTek (which is where this tape technology comes from) and was lucky to be asked to speak at the StorageTek Forum, that year held in Albuquerque, New Mexico. At the time, STK was about to release the 9840 drive, codenamed “eagle” and we had a number of press conferences and discussions about the new technology. StorageTek were always ahead with their tape technology and their own proprietary format, but the tradeoff was cost — STK was more expensive. Looking at Chris’ article, it made me wonder two things; first how are people calculating the ROI on such monsters and two, whether these kinds of tape drives have a future in the Enterprise data centre.
I laugh every time someone tells me tape is going away. There’s enough of it out there to stretch to the moon and back a few times. I think tape is going to be with us for a long time to come.
Read more at: Where Does Tape Go From Here?
