Oxford Style Debate – Episode 2: Tape Is Dead. Or Is It? Let’s Debate.

I totally understand your point. I felt some of this pain recently during a large recovery from tape.

In my case, we had around 130 VMs in the same media pool, so the restore was not simple at all. Loading/unloading tapes, finding the right restore points and planning the restore order made everything slower than a disk restore.

But we followed a priority strategy: AD, databases, logistics systems and critical services first. The goal was not to restore everything at once, but to make the environment operational again. Medium and low impact VMs came after.

And this is the point for me: it was not perfect, but it worked.

The backup server was compromised, repositories were compromised, and storage replication was compromised. Without the offline tapes, we would basically have nothing to restore from.

So yes, tape is painful sometimes. It is not perfect and it is definitely not the fastest option. But when it is well planned, with good media pools, media sets, rotation, maintenance and proper handling, it can still save the environment.

Another important point is cost. In projects, when we identify that an environment is not really following a 3-2-1 strategy, we usually recommend different ways to improve resilience: immutable repositories, object storage, backup copy, tape, offsite copies, etc.

But not every environment can adopt the ideal strategy right away. Some still rely on a very simple local backup strategy, and cost has a huge weight in these decisions.

So for me, tape is not about convenience. It is about having something to restore when everything else is gone, without making the cost impossible for the customer.

Thanks for challenging me. I’m in Team Tape isn’t dead! Why?

Let me tell my thoughts

• Real air-gap, not a software promise: A cartridge in a vault can't be encrypted, deleted, or accidentally “de-immutabled” (is this the correct word?) via an API. Object-lock is software, and software could have bugs, misconfigurations and sadly sometimes admins/users with too many privileges.
• Regulatory reality (often a Germany-specific thing): We have many customers who often request a 3-10 year retention. Also in some financial services, BaFin requirements (MaRisk, outsourcing) often explicitly call for a physically separated copy.
• The "CEO wants the last backup under his pillow" factor: Not a technical argument, but very real: if your chief justice wants to physically hold the last backup, that's stakeholder management and the best architecture fails without money given.

Where "modern" solutions fall short in practice

• Object storage stays online: and online means reachable by default. Ransomware groups now target IAM keys and API access directly, not just production VMs.
• Unseen or Hidden costs: Ingress is cheap, mass-restore from cold tiers can take weeks and get expensive fast.

Conclusion

• Tape handling costs staff time - manual swaps, labeling, vault logistics (taken offline, transport to a vault).
• Tape never belongs at the front of the recovery chain for RTO-critical systems — it's simply too slow for that role.
• That's exactly why the original statement is a false conflict: it's not "tape OR object storage," it's 3-2-1-1-0 -> tape delivers the cheap, air-gapped long-term copy; object/disk delivers the fast restores.

For sure, the Tape discussion also depends on your customers requirement. I wouldn’t recommend Tapes in every customers solution - probably the best answer would be, it depends 😉

Let’s throw the ball to another continent back, i call out for DJ JP! ​@Jean.peres.bkp 

Great Post!…..I'm waiting for the application plugin to integrate better with Tape for LTR…...it will surely come in release 13.1🤞

Thanks for challenging me, my German friend! ​@Dynamic 

Receiving the ball over here.

I'm also on the team that believes Tape isn't dead.

Posting my insights:

- How the market has been moving

• IBM has been massively transforming and improving its tape solutions.

The announcement introduces the IBM TotalStorage Ultrium Tape 2U Autoloader 3581 (models L28 and F28), a midrange tape automation solution that incorporates LTO Ultrium 2 technology, delivering significant improvements in capacity and performance over the previous generation. The system provides up to 1.6 TB native capacity (3.2 TB compressed) across 8 cartridge slots, with data transfer rates reaching up to 35 MB/s native (70 MB/s compressed), more than doubling Ultrium 1 performance. It also includes advanced features such as digital speed matching, a larger 64 MB buffer, improved power management, and backward compatibility with earlier media, making it a reliable and efficient solution for automated backup, archiving, and reducing backup windows in open systems environments.

• IBM acquired Diligent

IBM acquired Diligent Technologies to strengthen its portfolio in data protection, specifically in the area of Virtual Tape Libraries (VTL). The goal of this acquisition was not to replace traditional tape, but to complement it by adding advanced inline deduplication capabilities designed for backup and archive workloads. Diligent’s VTL technology emulates traditional tape libraries while using disk-based storage, allowing organizations to integrate seamlessly with existing backup environments while significantly reducing storage consumption through deduplication. With this move, IBM reinforced its strategy of offering both physical tape and virtual tape solutions, giving customers flexibility to choose the most efficient approach depending on performance, scalability, and cost requirements, especially in scenarios with large data volumes and repeated backup data.

- How I see clients moving on the subject
Since 2016, I have been overseeing backups, restores, tape handling, and secure transport operations, moving tapes daily to large corporate vaults.
Even though the cloud is flexible, fast, controllable, and highly available,
tapes remain a critical option for many companies.
Along this path, I've seen many businesses being restored, and customers "saving their own skin" at various points in their day.

- It's not for every customer
I believe that tape storage will still exist for many decades, but it will always depend on the client's profile.
There are clients for whom it doesn't make sense to keep the data for that long, or they don't have the infrastructure to create a tape environment.

We have healthcare clients in Brazil who need to keep their data for 20 years.

It's a challenge even for tapes, imagine structuring all of that in the cloud?

That's it, team!

Now I'm going to pass the ball to ​@kristofpoppe