Introduction
The rapid growth of data with annual growth rates of 50% and more, together with the requirement to contain the cost of data storage at a manageable level, requires careful data placement of data on the best suited storage medium.
Magnetic tape is the storage medium that offers by far the lowest cost of ownership for long term storage. An analysis of the tape market showed that most of today’s tape drive and media characteristics (capacity, throughput, longevity, etc.) as well as the cost of storing data on tape largely satisfy customer requirements. However, there is a strong demand for improvements in tape manageability and usability, for example, a non-proprietary, simpler and cost-effective integration of tape storage in the storage hierarchy, including tiered and cloud storage systems. Other areas for improvement are the data-access times and the lack of efficient random data read capabilities.