said by sporkme:said by nixen:said by N10Cities:Hmmmm.....I'll bet companies like EMC and others that specialize in NAS storage solutions WOULD LOVE to see this come to pass....because their business would grow by leaps and bounds! Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPPA, etc already are a big boost...nothing really wrong with that...just an observation...
Actaully, no, disk makers won't really benefit. That's not the type of data you keep on disk. Companies, like StorageTeK and ADIC, that make large tape libraries and companies, like Iron Mountain, that store tapes would benefit most.
What about all those folks pushing SATA as "near-line" storage? Who would you say is actually making inroads with that? I mean with a 3Ware controller and 500GB SATA drives you can easily get 5TB in a 3U case...
But why would you want to?
With tape, you do your daily vault, spit out the tape when it's and put it on a shelf until the retention policy has expired. Depending on your storage policies, a robot potentially never becomes full. You just keep rotating full tapes out and floating new ones in.
With a disk-based solution, you keep those disks spinning pretty much until they die. All those constantly spinning disks require a constant power pull. This also necessitates heat dissipation. Worse: what do you do when you've filled up those disks? You've got to replace them - either by incrementally replacing them or fully replacing the storage array.
Disk is great for transactional storage and even nearline storage. However, for "compliance" stuff, tape is the way to go.
-tom
