Tape Will Become Key Enabler of Massive Data Retention, Security, Energy, Sustainability, Immutability, Durability, and TCO

Data centers were confronted with several obstacles in recent years, including global inflation, US regional bank struggles, currency fluctuations, lingering supply shortages, increasing energy consumption, endless geo-political tensions, and the aggressive arrival of AI. Even with these ongoing challenges, signs of recovery gradually began to emerge in 2024, renewing confidence and stability in traditional data storage markets.

Growth projections for the amount of data stored worldwide continue to suggest a ~20 percent annual CAGR, a doubling of data stored approximately every four years. The AI avalanche has taken off in earnest, ushering in the dawn of AI disruption. The unquenchable thirst of AI for resources such as compute, memory, storage, power, and chilled water has placed energy usage, carbon emissions, and the overall environmental impact of data centers in the bullseye for most organizations. Without rich troves of high-quality data, the most sophisticated AI system has nothing to work with – they both need and enable each other. Fortunately, to harness this explosive growth, tape remains the most economical and environmentally friendly data center storage solution available and will securely retain the input/output source data to support AI workflows.

Generative AI significantly impacts enterprise storage by increasing data volumes while adding complexity. Enterprises need to quickly adapt their storage strategies to accommodate these new demands. While tape usage is increasing, due to inertia and a lack of strategic planning, much of the world’s lower activity unstructured data continues to reside on inefficient HDDs.

Stored Data Volume Projections – 2025 and Beyond

Secondary storage is designed to keep important, less active data on more economical, secure mediums that don’t need to be accessed as frequently as primary storage data. The importance and value of this data is increasing rapidly due to aggressive AI harvesting.

TRENDFOCUS projects installed storage capacity across all enterprise data centers is expected to reach approximately 6.4 ZBs in 2025 with at least 80 percent (about 5.12 ZBs) classified as archival or “cold” data, making secondary storage by far the largest data storage market. By 2030, total installed capacity is projected to reach approximately 17.4 ZBs, suggesting around 13.92 ZBs of secondary storage requirements.

By the end of 2025, if nothing changes, approximately 80 percent of all data stored will reside on expensive and energy-intensive HDDs. These projections indicate that most of the world’s cold but valuable data will continue to reside on inefficient HDDs unless enterprises begin to take advantage of the benefits of modern tape technology. HDDs and SSDs continue to store far too much cold data using massive amounts of energy. This may be the single biggest storage management challenge with the greatest payback when economics, total cost of ownership, and energy consumption are considered.

Fred Moore is a Technical Advisor to the LTO Show and Principal at Horison Information Strategies in Boulder, Colorado, a data storage industry analyst and consulting firm that specializes in keynote speaking, executive briefings, marketing strategy, and business development for end-users and storage hardware and software suppliers. Please reach out with story ideas or comments, we’ll respond to each directly at pete@ltoshow.com

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