Laura Loredo, HPE Worldwide Product Management Manager, the LTO Program, tells us that a strategy where tape-based storage is leveraged for long-term data retention allows organisations to securely archive large volumes of cold and frozen data in a cost-effective and energy-efficient way.

Faced with the on-going exponential data growth rate, IT leaders must contend with a retention burden that has a significant impact on issues ranging from budgets and technology to complexity and governance.
The scale of the collective challenge is difficult to overstate, with enterprises and data centres operating in a minimal delete ‘zettabyte era’ where total global data creation is projected to exceed 180 zettabytes – or 180 trillion gigabytes – by 2025.
Despite the cost associated with storing the massive amounts of data required to run modern businesses, organisations are challenged to determine which data can be deleted, and therefore retain a majority of all data stored. In fact, industry figures suggest that 60%-80% of all data is cold or frozen – i.e., infrequently or never accessed.
In certain industry sectors, this problem is difficult to avoid, with the likes of scientific, corporate, government public records and media/entertainment storage organisations needing to retain data on an indefinite basis, often for legal reasons.
At the same time, in many – if not most – data centres and enterprises, SSDs have become the primary storage technology of choice and are also increasingly deployed in the secondary and tertiary storage tiers. Part of the problem this has created is SSD technologies are a less-than-ideal cold/frozen storage solution, particularly given their relatively high energy consumption and cost per gigabyte compared to other approaches.
Take the issues associated with energy consumption and sustainability, for example. Data centres are already under considerable pressure to minimise CO2 emissions as part of the move to Net Zero, and storage has a significant role to play in the overall picture. Then there’s the impact of AI, which is prompting a further surge in storage requirements as advanced technologies are implemented at a rapid rate. Put all this together, and the reluctance to delete has some serious ramifications.
Tale of the tape
For many data centre users, one solution to this challenge has been to increase their use of tape storage which, over many decades, has proved its value as a reliable and cost-effective technology. Indeed, the ‘death’ of tape, which has long been predicted, is arguably further away than it’s been in years, given the significant growth seen in the market.
More specifically, reports suggest it will surpass over US$14 billion in value by 2032 – up from US$8 billion last year.
There are a number of factors contributing to this trend. Cybersecurity, for example, is one of the reasons why organisations have decided not to delete data, particularly given the rise of ransomware and the impact it can have on data assets.
Tape storage technologies such as Linear Tape-Open (LTO) are used to isolate data from network access, particularly as part of the 3-2-1-1, whereby organisations keep three copies of data across two media types, with one copy offsite and one offline.
In addition, LTO offers native hardware encryption, ensuring data remains inaccessible without the correct decryption key, adding a layer of protection against unauthorised access. It can also be combined with other security technologies, such as endpoint protection, intrusion detection (IDS) and security information and event management (SIEM) systems, as part of an integrated anti-ransomware strategy that also helps protect against a wide range of other cyberthreats.
Closely linked to this is the role of data immutability – an increasingly crucial concern among IT leaders, who have responsibility for ensuring all aspects of original data under their management remain unchanged. One option is to use enterprise HDDs and SSDs – technologies designed for 100% online duty cycles with limited encryption and immutability attributes.
One of the major shortcomings of this approach, however, is that they are rarely deployed for more than three to five years, meaning data must be continuously re-mastered. They are also prone to failure over time, do not fare well when powered down, and, as a result, offer limited or no offline air-gap protection required to meet immutability requirements.
In contrast, tape offers the offline air-gap security organisations need, together with Write Once Read Many (WORM) immutability backed by a 50-year technology lifespan.
Returning to sustainability, the single biggest difference between ongoing SSD, HDD, and tape costs is power consumption. This is in large part due to the way tape is used, with most tape cartridges residing offline rather than actively mounted in a drive. Add to this the minimal or even non-existent need for cooling, and there is a huge difference in cost.
For example, between 2020-2025, it is estimated that the active installed base of tape will consume around 18 megawatts of power – over 800 times less than the active installed base of enterprise HDDs and SSDs.
This has the potential to make a significant contribution towards the environmental performance of organisations and their data centre infrastructure. Tape storage, with its power consumption benefits, aligns well with these sustainability goals and provides a viable path toward meeting emissions targets.
Looking ahead, it seems highly unlikely that organisations will develop an appetite for deleting data at scale any time soon, meaning technology leaders must work out a more viable solution, particularly for their cold and frozen datasets. Without greater reliance on proven approaches, such as that provided by tape, there is limited scope for addressing pressing cost, security and sustainability challenges that have become so important to long-term business performance.
In contrast, a strategy where tape-based storage is leveraged for long-term data retention allows organisations to securely archive large volumes of cold and frozen data in a cost-effective and energy-efficient way, ensuring data remains accessible without the downsides associated with other storage solutions.