Comparing Offsite Tape Storage Costs for Businesses (Free Download)

Storing your most valuable data in the digital era means choosing a mixture of storage options to diversify your assets properly, including the cloud, external hard drives, and tape storage. Issues like offsite tape storage costs and proper diversification emerge alongside practical considerations.

Unfortunately, businesses often rely on a small pool of storage methods, potentially making them vulnerable. For example, in 2022, 60% of all corporate data was stored on the cloud. But the cloud isn’t immune to cybersecurity incidents, as many believe. In an IBM study, 45% of cybersecurity incidents were cloud-based.

Companies have increasingly turned to other storage options, including offsite tape storage and media vaulting. Despite being a legacy technology, it’s proven effective at offering an extra layer of security, but what’s the cost?

What is Offsite Tape Storage?

Few use offsite tape vaulting services as their primary storage method, but it’s quickly making a comeback. Tape storage works by storing data on magnetic tape consisting of a celluloid-like material that can be read and erased.

Due to the longevity and durability of tapes, companies often choose offsite tape vaulting for backup and archiving purposes. Some of the reasons tape backups are still used today include:

• High capacity
• Easily scalable
• Durability
• Reliability
• Security

For instance, state-of-the-art LTO 9 tapes can store up to 45 terabytes of data without compression. In other words, just a few tapes can more than meet the needs of most businesses.

Offsite backup tape storage enhances your security further. Specialized storage vaults offer the ideal climate for preserving data while providing physical security measures that protect your business in a disaster.

Plus, it’s worth mentioning that since tapes are not connected to the Internet, this effectively crushes the risk of a cyberattack.

Average Costs of Offsite Tape Storage

It can be difficult to adequately compare the average costs of various storage options because of the differences between vendors, startup costs, and geography. However, we’ve compiled a table detailing what the costs for you could look like.

Why Offsite Tape Storage is Cost-Effective

Offsite tape storage costs raise concerns among businesses. Basic cloud storage plans are much cheaper, but these platforms need more security and cost-effective scalability provided by offsite tape storage.

Let’s discuss why you should look past the immediate sticker shock and why turning to offsite tape storage companies makes more financial sense than you think.

Long-Term Data Retention Costs

Long-term data retention begins with an assessment of capital costs. Realistically, there are only two options for long-term data storage for archiving and backup purposes: cold cloud storage or tape storage offsite.

Typically, capital costs for backup tapes for servers tend to be overestimated. We can see that tape storage costs, including drives, media, and libraries, are much more affordable than many think.

For example, the Fujifilm TCO tool provides an average annual cost of $7 per terabyte of data. Compare this to even the cheapest cold cloud storage costs; tape storage is around 50% lower for storage periods of at least five years.

Remote vaulting costs are also low because offsite tape storage companies tend to scale to lower individual client costs. Yes, the startup costs are significantly higher for tape than the cloud, but in the long term, tape storage could save you thousands of dollars over a lifetime.

Plus, good luck trying to upload 500 TB to a cloud storage platform in 24 hours!

Energy Efficiency

Companies are increasingly concerned with reducing their carbon footprints. It’s why the global green data center market has soared to $53.88 billion in 2023.

If you’re concerned about energy savings, backup tapes for servers are the answer. According to an analysis from Fujifilm, tape storage can reduce energy consumption by 87% compared to disk storage.

Simply put, tapes don’t have to be connected to any power source during storage, curtailing energy consumption.

Cost-Effective Scaling

Many businesses can feel put off by offsite tape storage costs due to the immense startup investment required to build a tape library. But looking purely at these costs dismisses the overall cost savings.

Offsite tape storage can be easily scaled after getting set up because all you must do is buy another tape. With an LTO 9 storing 45 TB of data uncompressed and up to 100 TB when compressed, you can purchase another tape for under $100.

Compare this to a popular cloud storage platform like Backblaze. Currently, they charge $6 per TB per month. 45 TB of storage via this low-cost service would cost $270 per month. This doubles to $540 if assuming the data on your LTO 9 tape is compressed.

As you can see, storing 90 TB of data via Backblaze would cost $6,480 per year. Compare this to offsite tape storage, which may cost under $1,000 per year.

Reduced Data Center Footprint

Did you know that the footprint of data centers represents 2% of global carbon emissions?

If you’re worried about the ongoing environmental costs of your on-site and offsite data storage architecture, switching to tape can be one of your best moves.

According to one analysis from Spectrum, if a data center had to store 100 petabytes of data for ten years, storing everything on a hard disk would result in 7.4 tons of e-waste. However, if just 60% of this data were moved to tape, it would reduce the e-waste by 51% to 3.6 tons.

This is just an example of how offsite tape storage costs are not only lower, but they are also better for the environment.