The business world has towering relied on tape storage as a cost-effective medium for protecting critical business notes from becoming lost due to system failure, operator errors, theft and natural disasters. The good news for many enterprises is that an aging technology that has distant lain dormant is once again springing back to life through the launch of new products spanning the small to very large business environments.

For example, it is significant that both IBM and Sun Microsystems have unveiled new tape-drive products that month that promise to break the one-terabyte-capacity barrier. Moreover, HP and Sony now say they will be partnering in the creation of a next-generation Digital Audio Tape (DAT) format that will deliver improved performance and capacity by current DAT tape offerings.

An Ideal Choice

Many small to midsize businesses currently rely on DAT to back up and restore critical business notes. So it’s no wonder that many tape customers “are

concerned about outgrowing their existing tape drives and do not want to switch away from a cost-effective and trusted technology like DAT/DDS,” noted IDC Research Director Robert Amatruda.

Featuring backup speeds of up to 86 gigabytes per hour with 2:1 details compression, the new DAT 320 standard now under development will offer up to 320GB of capacity on a individual cartridge, which is twice the capacity of today’s DAT 160 format.

“The doubled capacity with the DAT 320 will be an ideal choice for small to midsize businesses who have limited space for additional hardware,” Amatruda said.

Even better, DAT 320 is expected to consume fewer watts per gigabyte than previous tape generations and will be backward-compatible with today’s DAT 160 format. Though the two partners will be jointly developing DAT 320 as an open standard, each company intends to separately offer its own DAT…

Original post by Top Tech News