I work for at an IBM data libary(currently at work actually). We have about 1.2 million tapes we manage(mostly 3480 and 3490).
The main thing I notice about them is reliability. I can go get a tape from 1988 and still read it and write to it without problem, which with a cdr or HDD that has been written over many many times is unlikely. The are very tough too, I've dropedd many a stack of tapes and they never break. They are also very cheap, and it is quite easy to get thousands of them used an relabled for much more cheaply than the price of raid-5 arrays and new optical media.
We can recover from a complete loss of this facility completely, and have simulated it before. We have nightly offsite backups of thousands of tapes.
The hardare surrounding this is very reliable too. Storagetek silos can hold a few terabytes of tapes. These run 24/7 and very rarely do they fail. The drives themselves put at least a hundred tapes through a day, and mabey 3 tapes a day out of 150 drives gets cycling many tapes gets stuck so that it requires human intervention.
With new tapes with higher capacities(and backwards compatability) and better automated systems I don't see these going out anytime soon. DVDs and HDDs are simply not rugged and maintenance free to transport many of them daily back and forth, and to use for many years without fail.
First post:)
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I work for at an IBM data libary(currently at work actually). We have about 1.2 million tapes we manage(mostly 3480 and 3490). The main thing I notice about them is reliability. I can go get a tape from 1988 and still read it and write to it without problem, which with a cdr or HDD that has been written over many many times is unlikely. The are very tough too, I've dropedd many a stack of tapes and they never break. They are also very cheap, and it is quite easy to get thousands of them used an relabled for much more cheaply than the price of raid-5 arrays and new optical media. We can recover from a complete loss of this facility completely, and have simulated it before. We have nightly offsite backups of thousands of tapes. The hardare surrounding this is very reliable too. Storagetek silos can hold a few terabytes of tapes. These run 24/7 and very rarely do they fail. The drives themselves put at least a hundred tapes through a day, and mabey 3 tapes a day out of 150 drives gets cycling many tapes gets stuck so that it requires human intervention. With new tapes with higher capacities(and backwards compatability) and better automated systems I don't see these going out anytime soon. DVDs and HDDs are simply not rugged and maintenance free to transport many of them daily back and forth, and to use for many years without fail. First post :)