-by Warren Smith

There is a hilarious new video on YouTube. Strangely, the video was produced by the EMC Corporation to suggest that Joe Tucci ordered employees there to get rid of tape, because the company is backing up to disk (one hopes not exclusively). Titled: “Bob and Joe: Fun with Tape” the premise of the video is however out of sync with Mark Lewis, EMC’s President Content Management and Archiving Division.

While the Tucci-obedient EMC employees in this video immediately begin to cut their tape into streamers and tie them to fans and jump and dance in front of the undulating tape snips, Mark Lewis has not yet amended his posted blog prediction dated August 5, 2007 that, “Here are my top 5 inflection points for storage technology in the next 3-5 years.

1. Offline Storage (Tape) becomes extinct for most uses…”

So who is right on the timing for “Tape is dead” reprisal, #12,435?

Joe – Now

Mark – in 3-5 years from August 2007 (making that 2010 – 2012)

Survey says: Neither of these can touch Nostradamus.

No doubt, either of these executives would love for you to believe that there is no use left for tape, except to create tacky air mobiles. But the reality of the marketplace shows proof positive that people still trust tape for the backups and archiving of much of their data. Fred Moore, well regarded storage analyst and President of Horison Information Strategies wrote in his February 2008 industry perspective “The tape market (Libraries, media and drives) is still a ~$4.2B industry in 2008. Tape cartridge capacity exceeds the capacity of hard disk drives and the gap will continue to widen as long as there is sufficient interest and commitment from remaining tape vendors.” Perhaps there is the thinking behind EMC’s new YouTube marketing: Convince tape storage vendors to give up on a $4.2B tape storage industry and EMC will enjoy migrating all of your data from tape to disk.

Well, HP StorageWorks is not buying into that one, Joe and Mark. Further, we at HP agree with the many people like Fred Moore, who see continuing value in tape storage, in increasingly diverse applications. Although tape’s traditional role as a backup medium has admittedly eroded from its earlier dominance, tape storage technology remains vital for archiving large amounts of less critical information that can be stored safely in case of future need. With email, and now even instant messaging, falling within the domain of compliance legislation, the rate of digital data growth is accelerating faster than ever – and with it demand for tape. As storage capacity continues its relentless growth, customers nearly everywhere are challenged to come up with the funding for the storage infrastructure to maintain this data. Even the wealthiest companies will struggle to justify the cost of preserving their entire content store on expensive disk arrays, even with lower cost disk drives.

At the end of the day, it’s pointless to split tape and disk into separate advocacy groups. HP StorageWorks holds that indeed, it is precisely the differences between tape and disk storage that makes them so effective in partnership. And so, is it just us or does EMC going on and on about the perfection of disk for this purpose and of disk for that purpose remind you of the person that only had a hammer and saw the entire world resembling a nail?

Sorry to hear about the EMC employees wasting their productive time on this video. Tape is not yet dead (footnoted source: Mark Lewis “I said ‘in the next 3-5 years’ “). More data today resides on tape than on disk. And this reality is likely to remain this way for longer than 3-5 years. But thanks EMC, for the video. And did everyone get Tucci’s memo? “Do something with the tapes!”. Thanks Joe! We certainly are.