Tape is the granddaddy of storage methods. Cheap, secure and durable, it has helped store data since the dawn of modern computing. But far from fading away, tape is proving a resilient solution in the storage marketplace. Predictions of 480 terabyte compressed capacity on a single cartridge make tape storage as relevant in today’s virtual marketplace as it was back when it replaced punch cards in the 1950’s, according to Calline Sanchez (pictured), vice president of IBM Enterprise Systems Storage.

“The biggest collaborations that I’ve been participating [in] recently are with cloud service providers, and they appreciate the economics of physical media, or tape,” Sanchez said.

Sanchez spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Lisa Martin (@LuccaZara), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the VMworld conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. They discussed the benefits of tape storage and the importance of attending shows and listening to advice from end users. (* Disclosure below.)

Storage is a business problem: How to best serve the data

The technology industry is no longer a “field of dreams” where companies build products and wait for customers. It’s about finding out what end users need and working within the ecosystem to build solutions. Sanchez is constantly asking questions to make sure that IBM’s product roadmap matches with what the industry needs.

“What do you want? What kind of security do you want? Are you OK with off-prem, public clouds? Those are some of the discussions we’ve been having on the floor, here, at VMworld, but also within our labs and also with the clients directly,” she said.

Security is the “table stakes” question, according to Sanchez, and one where tape is uniquely positioned. “Tape was the first device to fully encrypt … so tape is actually training the rest of our portfolio in similar skills, on how we do the end-to-end encryption elements,” Sanchez stated.

Economy is another major sales point for tape, but for a long time the limits on space were considered to make saving to tape impractical for large amounts of data. Combining tape and flash storage created Flape, which in 2014 Wikibon Inc. forecast would “offer not only lower costs, but also much higher performance than spinning disk-based alternatives.”

Four years later this prediction is coming true, as cheap flash storage, ever-increasing tape storage capabilities with Linear Tape-Open technology, and the potential maxing out of hard disk drive technology makes Flape an increasingly popular data storage solution.

“We’re serving big data. We’re having discussions about they’re going to grow to zettabytes by 2020, things like that. I never thought in my life, especially as an engineering student, or in computer science, I would ever be talking about this big of data. And now we’re here,” Sanchez concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the VMworld conference. (* Disclosure: IBM sponsored this segment, with additional broadcast sponsorship from VMware Inc. IBM, VMware, and other sponsors do not have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE