How will tapes role change?
The reports of tape’s demise have always been greatly exaggerated. This is not a market that we see going away. We expect that the market will continue to shrink in size, and there will be fewer tape products bought. But there’s a lot of it out there in the legacy infrastructure and one way vendors will be able to sell products going forward, especially disk-based backup products, will be by showing customers how they can blend those products with their existing tape infrastructure to achieve an optimum data protection strategy. It’s ironic — if you deploy disk-based technology judiciously, you can actually improve the performance and reliability of existing tape-based products. There are certain things that disk is very good at: fast restores, getting initial backups onto disk very rapidly and reliability. Those are all advantages in the disk space. Tape tends to excel in two areas: low-cost storage and performance. What we’re recommending to our customers is to front-end the backup
