The Future of Tape: Containing the Information Explosion

In many ways, tape is the unsung hero of information technology. From its introduction 50 years ago by IBM and 3M's tape group — which was one of the businesses spun off in 1996 to form Imation Corp. — tape quickly became the first removable data storage medium. Removability was vital — it enabled computing staff to get the digital data off of the mainframe and keep it for future use; moreover, removable media gave them a place to keep adding and storing more information.

Today, tape's job is to contain the information explosion — organizations are doubling the amount of digital information they generate and save each year, and nearly all data generated by large organizations today spends the bulk of its existence on tape media. With current and future advances in tape drives and media, IT organizations can expect tape to keep its place as the most efficient and cost-effective way to ensure that information is protected and preserved so it can be used again.

Key Trends
Tape media and drive manufacturers are continually addressing customer needs to meet new regulatory requirements, trends and IT applications by advancing tape systems to perform faster and hold more data. Some of these trends include:

Companies are facing increased requirements for records retention — particularly SEC requirements for long-term retention of financial records and transactions, and HIPAA requirements for health care organizations handling digital patient files.

Massive data volume growth is increasing the importance of near-line and off-line storage for disaster recovery and business continuance. On-line data storage is more than ever seen as one element in a multi-platform storage architecture, recognizing the growing importance of near-line and off-line storage. Because it is portable and removable, tape is critical to an effective disaster recovery plan, playing a complimentary role to on-line replication strategies. With the threats of sabotage, viruses and malicious data corruption, and natural and unnatural disasters hanging over every organization, the need for an off-site/off-line data copy that can be restored at any time, anywhere is critical to successful business continuance strategies.

Migration to Storage Area Networks (SANs) is allowing more effective and efficient utilization and tape sharing — making tape even more strategic in overall data protection architecture, and advancing the demands for high-capacity and fast performance in tape systems.


Imation Continues to Blaze the Trail
In 2002, Imation, made signature investments in current and future media format development that will help the industry meet challenging demands of the information explosion.

Imation is investing up to $49 million over the next two years to develop advanced media coating capabilities at its Weatherford, Okla., plant. The expansion is expected to allow Imation to advance its metal particulate (MP) manufacturing competencies across multiple formats for next generation data storage tape products. While the initial products will approach 400 gigabytes (GB) per cartridge, ultimately the new coating capability is expected to enable the company to develop tape cartridges with capacities reaching 1 terabyte (TB) and beyond (one TB is the equivalent of 1 million megabytes (MB) of data).
Imation has made a strategic investment in O-Mass AS, a subsidiary of Tandberg Data ASA (TAD.OL), and the two companies are working together to develop the world's fastest performing, highest capacity tape drive based on a combination of magnetic and optical technologies. The two companies will:

• Develop tape storage products based on a new technology that relies on magnetic writing and optical reading of standard magnetic tape, and is designed to improve the capacity and transfer rate of magnetic storage tape media;
• Develop and commercialize a tape drive and a corresponding tape cartridge with a native capacity of 1.2 terabytes (TB) and a 64MB/sec native transfer rate;
• Define a product family roadmap to deliver a 20TB capacity product.
  Under the terms of the agreement, O-Mass is responsible for the drive development and Imation is responsible for the tape cartridge media and format development.

In October 2002, Imation was awarded a grant from the National Institute of Standards and Technology Advanced Technology Program (NIST-ATP) for the development of technologies to advance the storage density capabilities of magnetic tape. The four-year, $11.9 million grant was jointly awarded to Imation and its partners to support the development of new technologies needed to increase data density of current magnetic tape data systems, and lay the foundation for even greater densities in future tape systems.

The program is intended to dramatically improve "volumetric data density" (the number of bytes of data stored in a data cartridge) for linear magnetic tape systems through a number of technical innovations. Imation's partners in this development program include Accutronics, Inc., Advanced Research Corp., Peregrine Recording Technology, Inc., and Read-Rite Corp.