Tape backup & archive — the air-gapped, lowest-cost tier

Very — and arguably more than ever. Ransomware has made the air-gap (a truly offline copy) essential, compliance retention keeps lengthening, and AI-era data growth makes the cost of keeping cold data on disk or cloud painful. Tape answers all three: it’s offline by default, immutable with WORM, and by far the cheapest £/TB for data you must keep but rarely read. The LTO roadmap runs to LTO-14 (up to 913 TB), so the format has a long future.

A cartridge that isn’t in a drive is physically disconnected — there is no network path for malware (or a compromised admin account) to encrypt or delete it. That makes tape the ideal "1 offline / air-gapped copy" in the modern 3-2-1-1-0 backup rule. Even if production and online backups are hit, the tape copy survives for a clean restore.

For cold, long-retention data tape is the cheapest by a wide margin. Disk arrays draw power and cooling 24×7; cloud archive tiers add monthly storage fees and — critically — egress/retrieval charges when you need the data back. Tape media has a low one-off £/TB, idle cartridges cost nothing to keep, and restores incur no egress. Our tape-vs-disk-vs-cloud guide shows the 10-year picture.

LTO-9 stores 18 TB native and up to 45 TB compressed (2.5:1) per cartridge, and streams up to 300 MB/s native per drive. An HPE StoreEver MSL3040 library scales to 12.6 PB compressed with LTO-9 across its 280 slots.

WORM (Write Once, Read Many) cartridges can be written once and never altered or erased — the data is immutable. That satisfies long-retention and tamper-evidence requirements in regulated sectors (financial services, healthcare, legal). Combined with the air-gap, WORM tape is a strong defence for records you must be able to prove are unchanged.

The full range: the MSL 1/8 G2 Autoloader (8 slots, one drive — entry/branch), the MSL2024 (a compact business-class library), the scalable MSL3040 (40 to 280 slots, up to 21 drives, up to 12.6 PB) and the enterprise MSL6480 (up to 560 slots, 42 drives). We size the library to your backup volume, window and growth.

An autoloader (like the MSL 1/8 G2) has a single drive and a handful of slots — perfect for unattended backup at one site. A tape library (MSL2024/MSL3040) has multiple drives and many more slots, so it can run parallel streams, hold a deeper rotation, and scale with modules. Choose an autoloader for simplicity, a library for capacity and speed.

Yes — LTO/StoreEver is supported by the major backup platforms including Veeam, Commvault, Veritas NetBackup and Rubrik, typically as the long-term archive or "copy to tape" tier behind a disk landing zone (e.g. HPE StoreOnce). Disk handles fast backup/restore; tape provides the cheap, air-gapped long-term copy.

Partly. LTO-8 and LTO-9 drives write and read one generation back (an LTO-9 drive uses LTO-9 and LTO-8 media). Earlier generations read two back. LTO-10 introduces a new media format and is not backward compatible. Our "LTO generations explained" guide has the full read/write matrix.

LTO drives include hardware AES-256 encryption, so cartridges — especially those taken off-site — are protected at rest with no performance penalty. Keys are managed by your backup software or an external key manager for compliance.

Yes, and it’s the recommended design: back up to a fast deduplicating disk target like HPE StoreOnce for quick restores, then copy older/locked recovery points to tape for the cheap, air-gapped, long-term archive. Your backup software automates the lifecycle.

Yes — we size and supply StoreEver autoloaders and libraries, LTO-9 drives and media, integrate them with your backup software, and deliver UK-wide with optional on-site installation. Contact sales@servnetuk.com or call 0800 987 4111.