I remember him telling me two things – first, there was no need for tape, that everything would be disk.
Second, and this was much earlier and most likely will be denied but I swear it was true – he said that there would come a time where disk was unnecessary because memory would keep getting bigger and cheaper. His first argument is coming to fruition, albeit slowwwwwly. His second didn’t take into account the absurd rate of data growth and therefore the economic impact associated with that.
Dell made this announcement which is using removable disk technologies from ProStor as a direct low-end/mid-market replacement for tape based media and systems. These cartridges have the same basic form factor as tape and even higher levels of tolerance (for dropping them, for example) and longer media life – AND they are disk – good old random access, readable in twenty years, disk. The possibilities are endless.
If there is a big business right now replacing tape and tape function with disk based subsystems, what if the data de-duped frenzy going on now could also have a removability element for deep bunker archive?
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Steve Duplessie is the author of the “Steve’s IT Rants” blog, and the founder and Sr. Analyst of the Enterprise Strategy Group.
