Tape Primed for Rise of Secondary Storage

The Tape Storage Council has published its Market Outlook 2023. Below the intro of the report you can download from here.

Introduction
As the widespread impact of Covid-19 eases, new concerns have emerged. These include geo-political tensions, global warming, a fragile supply chain, prolonged inflation, higher interest rates, and rising transportation, health care, food and energy prices. All of which have painted a choppy macro-economic picture. Not surprisingly, these trends have also caused storage demand and forecasts to fluctuate. Current growth projections of at least 25% annually suggest
a doubling of data stored every three years.

Zettabyte era storage demands are driving advanced solutions to effectively contain petascale and exascale requirements. In parallel the unquenchable thirst for IT services has placed energy usage, carbon emissions and the overall environmental impact of data centers squarely in the bull’s eye for most organizations to address. Magnetic tape is currently the most economical and environmentally friendly storage solution available, but even with the new compelling advantages of tape, much of the world’s lower activity data continues to reside by virtue of inertia and a lack of strategic planning, in the wrong place. Specifically, that’s on more costly to operate HDDs which require constant power and cooling to maintain reliable operations.

Members
The Tape Storage Council, which includes representatives of BDT, Cozaint, FujiFilm, GazillaByte, Grau Data, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM, Imagine Products, Insurgo Media, Iron Mountain, MagStor, mLogic, Oracle, Overland-Tandberg, OWC Mercury, PoINT Software & Systems, QStar, Qualstar, Quantum, Spectra Logic, StorageDNA, SullivanStrickler, Symply, Turtle, and XenData, has issued this report to highlight the current trends, usages and technology innovations occurring within the tape storage industry.