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concern among IT leaders , who have responsibility for ensuring all aspects of original data under their management remain unchanged . One option is to use enterprise HDDs and SSDs – technologies designed for 100 % online duty cycles with limited encryption and immutability attributes .
One of the major shortcomings of this approach , however , is that they are rarely deployed for more than three to five years , meaning data must be continuously remastered . They are also prone to failure over time , do not fare well when powered down , and , as a result , offer limited or no offline air-gap protection required to meet immutability requirements .
In contrast , tape offers the offline air-gap security organisations need , together with Write Once Read Many ( WORM ) immutability backed by a 50-year technology lifespan .
Returning to sustainability , the single biggest difference between ongoing SSD , HDD , and tape costs is power consumption . This is in large part due to the way tape is used , with most tape cartridges residing offline rather than actively mounted in a drive . Add to this the minimal or even non-existent need for cooling , and there is a huge difference in cost .
For example , between 2020 – 2025 , it is estimated that the active installed base of tape will consume around 18 megawatts of power – over 800 times less than the active installed base of enterprise HDDs and SSDs .
This has the potential to make a significant contribution towards the environmental performance of organisations and their data centre infrastructure . Tape storage , with its power consumption benefits , aligns well with these sustainability goals and provides a viable path toward meeting emissions targets .
Looking ahead , it seems highly unlikely that organisations will develop an appetite for deleting data at scale any time soon , meaning technology leaders must work out a more viable solution , particularly for their cold and frozen datasets . Without greater reliance on proven approaches , such as that provided by tape , there is limited scope for addressing pressing cost , security and sustainability challenges that have become so important to long-term business performance .
In contrast , a strategy where tape-based storage is leveraged for long-term data retention allows organisations to securely archive large volumes of cold and frozen data in a cost-effective and energy-efficient way , ensuring data remains accessible without the downsides associated with other storage solutions . �
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