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back to article Spectra: Tape is dead? We installed 550PB of the stuff in 6 months

Tape library vendor SpectraLogic says it installed 550PB of tape library capacity in the second half of 2012 and reports that its revenues, led by rising T-Finity library sales, for that six months were up 9 per cent compared to a year ago. Half an exabyte of tape equates to the installation of roughly a dozen of the vendor's …

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  1. Alan Bourke

    Tape is one of these things that is always dead

    and always will be nearly dead, according to the 'trendsetters' anyway. Like COBOL, the PC, desktop applications and, what is it this week .... Java, I believe.

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    1. It'sa Mea... Mario
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      Terminator

      Re: Tape is one of these things that is always dead

      COBOL is dead, an even in places where it does not look like it is dead it should very much be considered a zombie...

      Tape I have no opinion on...

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      1. Don Jefe
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        Re: Tape is one of these things that is always dead

        COBOL is alive and well in financial and legacy engineering firms. If developers want to make scads of cash quickly 'dead' languages are a good place to be.

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        1. Anonymous Coward
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          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Tape is one of these things that is always dead

          "COBOL is alive and well in financial and legacy engineering firms. If developers want to make scads of cash quickly 'dead' languages are a good place to be."

          True, there is a ton of COBOL out there which needs to extended and updated. Unlikely to be going anywhere, anytime in the near future. As no one is trained in COBOL in university (although some electives are now coming back) and the related OSs, utilities, there is a high amount of demand for those skills.

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    2. Anonymous Coward
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      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Tape is one of these things that is always dead

      Agree, the fickle IT world seems to think anything which not growing rapidly = dead. Until someone comes up with another way to store PBs of data with very little energy utilization for a very low cost, tape will not even be challenged as the archive medium. EMC was pushing the "tape is dead" idea. Just a coincidence that they don't have anything other than rebrand in the tape market, but are the largest player in the disk and VTL market which would benefit from the decline of tape. Cui bono.

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    3. Voland's right hand Silver badge
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      Devil

      Re: Tape is one of these things that is always dead

      As the saying goes: Never, ever underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes.

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  2. NomNomNom

    Color me surprised, of course people used a lot of tape in the last 6 months, we just had Christmas. What's next in surprising news? pope is catholic?

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    1. Ken 16 Silver badge
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      Devil

      I thought he'd retired from that

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  3. Longrod_von_Hugendong
    Angel

    Mind you...

    spending 8.1 Milllllllion whatevers should mean the tape(s) are not empty or just contain readme.txt when you need to get something off them.

    Now, first prize to anyone who can span all the tapes using tar and gzip WITHOUT looking at google for the command line switches :D

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    1. Anonymous Coward
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      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Mind you...

      Which tar? GNU tar, star, BSD tar, Sys V tar, or a proprietary implementation? Anyway, real men use dd straight from the block device to the tape device.

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  4. The Jase

    tape

    Symantec's latest Backup Exec disaster works on the premise that tape is dead.

    Its far from dead, but Symantec's selling of Backup Exec might be if they don't take it into consideration.

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