HPE tops in tape. Yes, tape is still a thing

Re: ribbons of trust?

And with the physical write protect switch enabled, little can go wrong during a restore.

Tape is useless?

Huh? No one uses tape, and there are cheaper ways of storing data...Sorry which planet do you live on?

Why then do people like Google, yahoo, Microsoft Bing, the Met Office, post production companies along with other small/medium and large companies all use tape? Because it's cheap, requires less space and cooling than any other technology. The main reason why they use tape is the cost benefit of tape, it's very clear to see when your storing 10-100's of PB's of data. Especially when you compare it to the cost of disk or flash over the 3-5 life span of a disk or flash system of similar size.

A fantastic advantage of tape is that it gives you the safety of an air gap, between your live data, and your DR copy. So if ransom ware get onto your network and control of your disk arrays, and render them useless unless you paid $$$. With a tape copy of your arrays, you can just format your arrays and pull all the data back from the last backup you did before you were attacked. Provided you do backups of course.....

One last point before I go, disk has hit the limits of space at roughly 8TB's and is struggling hard to go beyond that. Were as currently tape technology like LTO-7 can do 6TB per tape, and the TS1150 technology can do 10TB per tape. Now thats not much bigger than disk at the moment. But tape manufactures have a long way to go, before they hit the limits of tape technology. So tape will soon over take disk, and continue to get more and more dense, while spinning disk will be replaced by flash. So is tape dead and useless? Not at all, its just getting started!