In his latest Professional Alert, Wikibon CTO David Floyer envisions a future in which disk drives become increasingly rare as flash becomes the preferred storage medium for all active data, while virtually all inactive data, as well as all archives and data backups, go on tape. And that future may not be far off. Investment in and development of high-performance disk drives has dried up, and Wikibon predicts that by 2015 the majority of active data and metadata will be stored on NAND flash. Meanwhile, while IT revenues have been under pressure for a decade, investment in tape actually grew 12% in 2012 according to the Santa Clara Consulting Group. The rebirth of tape is being driven by three technological factors:

1. The introduction and subsequent general adoption of the Linear Tape File System (LTFS), which stores data and metadata together on the tape and creates an application-independent index of data on each tape. This solves the major problems with data recovery from tape, allowing multiple applications to access data from a tape easily.

2. The rapid increase in data density and transfer rates, which now exceeds that of disk, so that transfer of consecutive data is actually faster using tape. With the erosion of investment in the development of high-speed disk, tape is likely to maintain or increase that advantage.

3. The advent of vertical applications that combine tape with other storage media along with the rewriting of increasing numbers of existing applications to use LTFS.

The result, writes Floyer, is that tape is the last medium of record for archiving and backup as well as compliance and other “boring but important” use cases. Tape is also the easiest medium to remove from the drive and put in a truck, and a truck full of data tapes is by far the highest bandwidth method of moving large amounts of data. Experts say that moving 1 Tbyte of data across the Internet takes 10 days in an optimal situation. Put that data on a tape and it can be air shipped anyware worldwide in less than 24 hours. The largest capacity tape cartridge, the Oracle StorageTek T10000D, has a capacity of 8.5 Tbytes uncompressed.

Slower, high-density disks are still seeing investment. However, Wikibon predicts that tape will gain density and IO capacity faster than disk and will provide the lower-cost, more practical tape solution for low-access data, where fast access is not required and reads can take seconds rather than milliseconds, while all high access data will migrate to flash as its price continues to fall and dependability increase.

David Floyer’s full analysis, including a comparison of the various vendors and the impact of the LTO-7 upgrade expected in 2014 or ’15, is available without charge on the Wikibon Web Site. IT professionals are invited to register for free membership in the Wikibon Community. Members can post comments on published research and publish their own questions, tips, Professional Alerts, and white papers on the site. They also receive invitations to the periodic Peer Insight Meetings, where their peers discuss how they are solving business and technical problems with creative use of advanced technologies.