Last week I did a podcast from NAB talking about Linear Tape File System (LTFS) with one of our long-time tape gurus Mark Fleischhauer.  The next morning after I talked to Mark, I got a demo in our booth of some new software that we'll have available soon that allows you to use LTFS on Windows systems. 

The tape is dead FUD won't go away until those that like to proclaim it's early demise are - well, I'll just say gone.  LTFS is a fantastic proof point of how tape will continue to exist long into the future. 

So check out the demo of our LTFS software on Windows.



NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) is wrapping up tomorrow; today at NAB I focused on LTFS doing both a podcast and getting a video demo of using LTFS in a Microsoft Windows environment.  You'll have to wait until next week to see the demo because I have to edit the video on my Z600 Workstation which I did take with me to Las Vegas.

The podcast I have is very interesting - I had a great time talking to Mark Fleischhauer.  As you'll hear, Mark has been a tape technologist for a long time.  We talked about the new life that tape has been given because of LTFS and I think we pretty well smash the "tape is dead" conversations I see about once a week. 

Here's the podcast with Mark.

SNW Europe just wrapped up today and I'll have a few podcasts over the next several days from there.  The first is with my European colleague Chris Sopp.  Chris is a European product manager for data protection and on the first day of SNW, he did a presentation titled "Introduction to Data Protection" that was surprisingly well attended.  In this podcast, we talked about why so many people attended an intro session. 

Maybe you’ve heard some of the industry buzz around our LTO-5 Ultrium Tape Drive and its Linear Tape File System (LTFS) feature? Now it’s time to get automated—with HP StoreOpen.

Guest post talking about using LTO with RFID to archive.

This post is from Simon Watkins, Nearline Solutions Product Marketing Manager introducing the HP ESL G3 Tape Library.  I'm amazed that every time we do a blog post talking about tape, it's a popular article.  Given the new ESL Tape Library - this should be a popular post too.

This post is a guest post from our nearline tape product marketing manager Simon Watkins.  Simon recaps some of the latest market numbers that show tape is still going strong and is far from dead.

In today's article, Ultrium LTO product manager Laura Loredo looks back at 10 years of LTO technology and looks ahead to the future.

Hi Folks,

Yesterday I received a letter in the mail at home that started off:

Dear Sir or Madam,

We are writing to let you know that computer tapes containing some of your personal information were lost while being transported to an off-site storage facility by our archive services vendor. While we have no reason to believe that this information has been accessed or used inappropriately, we deeply regret that this incident occurred....

So the first question I have is how does an archive vendor lose tapes? How hard can it be to take the tapes from your customer put them in a secure truck and drive them to the storage facility? Isn't that your whole business model - you will pick up, transport and store these tapes safely and securely 100% of the time?

Now I understand that any activity with humans involved cannot be guaranteed to work 100% of the time. So what really happened? A bit more of an explanation would have been helpful, such as the truck was in an inadvertent accident and the contents of the truck were spilled into a river or all over the highway and could not all be recovered. Without more details I'm left wondering did someone make off with the tapes by accident or on purpose? Or was this just sloppy work by the company?

Anyway, I hope this is a call to action for this company to do at least two things to prevent such an incident in the future.

1. Look into tape encryption such as the LTO-4 offers. I would have been more much pleased if that second sentence read "While the tapes were physically lost, the data they contained cannot be accessed or read by anyone because the data on the tapes is securely encrypted with sophisticated technology requiring encryption keys to make the data readable. Our security policy ensures that these keys are always stored in or transported to physically separate locations from the computer tapes."

2. Consider the use of replication and electronic vaulting for moving data off-site for archiving. With new technologies such as deduplication and low-bandwidth replication, this company would perhaps be able to reduce the amount of data that is stored on tapes and physically transported to archive storage. Again, I don't know the specifics here, but as an example let's say this company had four sites that they were backing up to data to tape and transporting those tapes to off-site archives. With replication and electronic vaulting, they could replicate data from three of their sites to just one site for backup to tapes and then only have to move tapes from the one site to archive storage thereby reducing their risk exposure by 75%.

If you're worried about how a similar incident could impact your company and what risks are involved HP is here to help. We can work with you to significantly reduce your data security exposure from the desktop to your data center. On the storage side, we offer a FREE storage security risk assessment. For more details on HP's other data security options beyond storage please check HP's Security web page.