| While EMC claims that tape is in “collapse”, IBM announced on April 2010 the public availability (at no cost) of the IBM Long Term File System software. This software product uses the Linear Tape File System (LTFS) to allow users and applications direct access to files and directories stored on the tape, as well as to create and access files as they would be allocated in a USB stick or external hard disk. LTFS is currently available for Linux and Mac Oss, and will be available for Windows support at the end of 2010. IBM together with HP and Quantum run The LTO Consortium(Linear Tape-Open format consortium), and have released the latest generation of the Linear Tape-Open format (LTO-5). The LTO-5 allows files to be written directly to a tape and to be read by another computer, independently of OS or application. Today, large enterprises usually use a combination of disk and tape for their backup and storage needs for leveraging costs and access of data. Tapes are mainly used to support archives in Financial, Telecommunications and Medical enterprises/organisations that have large volumes of transactions, images or data that need to be recorded, stored or archived. However, as tapes are generally slower than disk, in both access time and transfer rate, enterprises also evaluate the usage of disk-based systems technology coupled with data reduction (deduplication), for back-ups, archiving, recovering and restoring systems. Sources: |
