For the Love of Tape

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text][mk_dropcaps style=”simple-style”]A[/mk_dropcaps]s we head into the celebration of Valentine’s Day, we look to the heartfelt version of tape – with some surprising statistics on sales of cassette tapes in 2017. Did you know (according to Nielsen Music), US cassette sales had a 35% increase over 2016 with 174,000 sold. We accredit this trend to “hipster” artists bringing back an old trend to differentiate their record launches, such as Lil Uzi Vert’s Luv is Rage, DJ Khaled’s Grateful, and Lana Del Rey’s Lust for Life.

Getting back to business, the LTO tape that we care about in the data center has increased 5% in media shipments YoY for the first three quarters of 2017, based on the LTO Consortium tape media reports. For the past seven years, we don’t usually hear people say they “love tape.” However, we’re starting to hear an increasing number of IT departments maintaining tape or adding it to the storage infrastructure.

Why are people falling head-over-heels in love with tape? Here are just a few reasons:

1. Tape protects your backups from ransomware – the only truly offline copy of your data that’s 100% safe.
2. Tape allows you to maintain complete control of your data on-site.
3. Tape technology has come a long way with LTO-8 tape density at 30 TB of compressed data.
4. Depending on recovery needs and amount of data, tape can save you considerable $$ over cloud storage.

Feeling like you might want to give tape a second chance? Quantum’s new Scalar i3 and i6 libraries provide automatic software patches and security updates to ensure your offline copy of your data is 100% protected. Learn more about our tape libraries and technical details on LTO-8 from our whitepaper.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]