Tape is making its way back to the enterprise after a few years in the wilderness claimed an Overland Storage executive.

Andy Waisky, Overland's vice president of European sales said that those who pronounced the death of tape had been mistaken. "Tape lost its way for a while but it's still here and it's a great solution," he said. "It's moved from being primary backup to archiving as people moved to disk but there's plenty of life in it," he added.

Waisky was speaking at Storage Network World where the company announced the launch of a new family of automated tape libraries.

The new Neo range includes the 200S, a compact 2u model with up to 38.4 TB of capacity and the 400S, providing up to 76.8 TB of capacity in a 4u form factor. The products also offer web-based remote management; removable cartridge magazines; an integrated barcode reader to facilitate fast media tracking and encryption to help companies meet their compliance requirements.

The company has also ditched its previous ArcVault brand and brought its tape products under the Neo brand name. Waisky said that the company was cutting its prices aggressively. "Price is very important - particularly at entry level. However," he said, "there are other factors too: notably reliability and support. Once you have it set up, you don't want to touch it."