Oracle has boasted big sales of tape storage to fit into its own StorageTek T10000C Tape Drives, reminding the industry of the media's significance.
It claimed to have shipped more than one exabyte of media for the drives in the nine months since launch, making it the fastest growing of the StorageTek lines to date.
Oracle also laid claim to shipping the most tape libraries of over 1,000 slots. It backed up the figure with an IDC report, showing it held 70 per cent market share, as well as topping the list for most tape drives sold in the first half of 2011.
James Cates, vice president, of hardware development at Oracle, used the numbers to defend the investment his firm makes into the tape space, which many others see as old news.
"The consistent growth we're seeing in our StorageTek T10000C Tape Drives further highlights the value of Oracle's innovation in tape storage," he said.
The StorageTek T10000C Tape Drive offers either 5TB or 5.5TB native capacity - customers have to shell out the extra for the StorageTek Maximum Capacity' drives - and has a transfer rate of 252MB per second, which Oracle claims to be the fastest in the world.
The figure-heavy hardware announcement comes at a time when Oracle is focusing much of its efforts on cloud computing. Last October, the company launched its first public cloud applications - Fusion Apps - offering the likes of CRM and HCM as a service.
However, after acquiring $7.4 billion for Sun Microsystems just over two years ago Oracle is also keen to regularly flex its hardware muscles in public and show investments are still being made into traditional platforms.
