With the overwhelming explosion of data witnessed in the Internet era, the need for companies to secure an efficient and effective data storage and recovery system assumes great urgency.

According to findings from America's Berkeley University during research conducted by Sony Broadcast and Professional, it took humans 300,000 years to accumulate 12 exabytes of data but that it would take 2.5 years more to collect the next 12 exabytes.

A feature of the Gulf IT exhibition (Gitex) in Dubai in October was the introduction by Sony Broadcast & Professional of tape-based data storage and library solutions for all corporate, IT, governmental, broadcast and medical industries.

Illustrating comparative examples of past, current and future data storage and management needs, Steve Leaver, product manager, Data Storage Solutions, Europe, at Sony Broadcast and Professional, said: "A couple of decades ago, it took Citibank 20 years to accumulate one terabyte of data. Today Yahoo buys that much storage each week for its Data Warehouse, and in the next five years everything that was ever written would be digitised.

"Within the current environment that demands a need to centralise and manage data in a more cohesive, efficient and cost-effective manner, Sony's tape-based storage and library-management systems are set to provide huge savings in terms of cost and time and boost the efficiency of any operation in which they are installed," said a Sony press release.

To store 1GB of data on Sony products costs approximately $1 million compared to disks that cost about $90. It saves time since Sony data storage products have a native transfer rate of 24MB/switch, which makes data retrieval and storage quick.

There are savings in space as one Sony tape cassette can store 200GB of uncompressed data compared with 100GB with other formats, thus eliminating the need for huge banks of tape storerooms.

Sony's archive tapes have a lifespan of about 30 years versus disks, which can be used for about five years but without the ability to remove the disk media. Sony has just completed a successful project for PDO Shell Oman.

"Considering the vast amount of research material that is generated by PDO Shell Oman through their seismic studies, the company required a rapid and automated data backup system involving a tape library that could backup four terabytes of data every week," explained Nigel Thomson, Sony Broadcast and Professional Middle East.

Following an intensive study of PDO Shell's requirements, Sony provided the DMS-B150 with two DTF-2 drives. This has a capacity of 30 terabytes (expandable to 128 terabytes with up to 6 DMS-EX 15OL library extension modules and up to 18 DTF-2 drives). The system is capable of storing 4 terabytes in 24 hours if required.