3rd October 2007, 1 min read

Tape as the future of storage: are Sun and Dell insulting our intelligence?

Mike Stiber says:

October 3, 2007 at 1:23 pm

I think Sun is grasping at straws. As soon as they became a Windows OEM, they were toast. They’ll never be able to compete on price with cheap PC makers, and so they’re desperately trying to come up with a way to differentiate their products. It’s like a company trying to figure out a way to get people to pay $60,000 for a car indistinguishable from a Ford Taurus. Note that this doesn’t preclude the ability of a car manufacturer from making a $60,000 car; nor does it mean that the only way to compete is via price.

As far as tape is concerned, I’d say you’re partly right. But, what if I want 500TB of storage and can accept a fair amount of access time delay? A tape library with only one or two actual tape drives will be cheaper than a bunch of disk drives. The incremental cost of adding another tape is much smaller than adding another HD.