Data growth rates are on the rise — approaching more than 160 zettabytes by 2024, according to an International Data Corporation study.

Not surprisingly, large cloud service providers are scrambling to develop long-term strategies that will enable them to handle the data deluge. Finding the space for simply storing all the bits is, itself, a strategic challenge for the Amazons, Microsofts, Googles and other “industrial farmers of the cloud.”

Meanwhile, for data-intensive organizations and businesses, coping with burgeoning data is a nuanced challenge. Just as important as finding space for storing bits is the need to store the data in a way that is economical and well-suited to the rapid access demands of workloads such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and digital media.

To control storage costs and maximize data value, data management must become simpler, faster and less labor-intensive. Not surprisingly, older storage strategies have been coming under increased scrutiny.

Maybe Tape Really Is Dying This Time

Traditionally, companies have turned to lower-cost, higher-capacity media — namely, tape storage — to store older data. Almost from the beginning of business computing, tape storage has shouldered the burden of data protection (backup) and long-term data preservation (archive). Some estimates hold that up to 80% of the world’s data is stored on tape.

For decades, tape economics made sense for storing rarely accessed and rarely changing data for extended periods of time. Today, tape technology is more expensive to own and operate, in part due to less competition among vendors. There are fewer suppliers of tape drives and media today than there were in the past.

Unlike disk or flash storage, tape media is portable and removable. That is a good thing from the perspective of removing disaster recovery (DR) copies of data to off-site storage, but it also creates manual processes for loading and unloading tape that increases labor costs. Humans are required to move media in and out of libraries and in and out of storage facilities. Today, companies are scaling back in informational technology (IT) staff by employing remote public or private cloud architectures for off-site storage.