Organizations need to build infrastructure that will support them today and well into the future—with levels of security that keep up with the rapidly advancing threat landscape.

A few months ago I took part in a community forum discussion with some IT folks at small and midsize businesses, alongside some colleagues on our HPE SMB team. One of the things we were interested in was how these companies are meeting their backup, recovery and archiving needs. I asked if anybody was using tape storage. Some participants said “no, we just send everything to the cloud.” But there were also quite a few who said “yes, we’ve been using it for backup for years, we get huge value from it, and we couldn’t get by without it.”

The response from that second group may come as a surprise for many SMB leaders. There’s a perception out there that tape storage is an older, pre-cloud technology that doesn’t offer much to today’s data-driven companies. And it’s true that it’s been around a long, long time (50 years or so) – to call it “tested, tried and true” would be putting it mildly.

But the wider reality is that tape-based storage offers big advantages for backup, recovery and archiving strategies for businesses of all sectors and sizes. In many ways, it’s ideally suited to smaller organizations, as well as remote and branch offices. Tape-based systems are a perfect complement to your cloud- and disk-based primary storage systems.

Here are the three key benefits, as I see it:

1. Attractive economics. Most SMBs accumulate data at an astonishing rate, and the cost of housing it can quickly become significant as the gigabytes evolve into terabytes and petabytes. Tape is widely recognized in the industry as the lowest-cost option for long-term data retention. You can back up your data very cheaply on a per-gigabyte basis. I’ve seen HPE estimates at around $0.003 per GB for the life of the cartridge. (Check out this short e-book for some eye-opening statistics: Tape Storage: A Modern Solution for the Digital Age.) True, there’s an initial investment involved, but it’s a one-time cost for a long-lived system, as opposed to the cloud’s recurring, open-ended monthly payments.
2. Energy efficiency. The energy consumed by tape storage is a tiny fraction of an equivalent HDD system. That’s another cost savings, and an important consideration for companies that place a high value on sustainability.
3. Built-in resilience and security. By adding tape drives to your backup and recovery strategy, you diversify your options and gain added confidence that you can quickly bounce back from natural disasters as well as external security breaches and ransomware attacks. You might decide to keep two or three copies of your key data sets at different facilities or at a third-party secure location. You get the peace of mind that comes from knowing you can get everything up and running again quickly, even without the cloud.

Plus, tape storage solutions provide offline, hack-proof “air gap” security for long-term data retention. They can help you ensure compliance with data protection regulations like the European Union’s GDPR and whatever similar rules may be coming down the pike.

If you’re interested in putting tape storage to work for your SMB, here are two solutions you might want to investigate:

HPE StoreEver Tape Storage. Our comprehensive portfolio of tape drives, tape libraries, tools and media covers your company’s short-term backup, disaster recovery, and long-term retention needs.

HPE RDX Removable Disk Solutions. Designed with SMBs and branch offices in mind, these solutions give you a simple and cost-effective way to back up and protect your critical data. You can read more about what HPE RDX Removable Disk Solutions can do for your business here.

Mark Simpkins
Server Experts
Hewlett Packard Enterprise

twitter.com/HPE_Servers
linkedin.com/showcase/hpe-servers-and-systems/
hpe.com/servers