Tape storage has been around longer than most people have been working in IT, and it has been the subject of prolonged and brutal attacks by technologies that seek to displace it for most of that time. Yet it continues to thrive. While sales of new tape systems are down (by some measures by as much as 25%), they are not out.
Businesses continue to rely on tape for its unique role of providing long term archival and replication of data. Tape spans the entire continuum of data centers, from the self maintained racks in a storage closet to multi-million dollar facilities with multi-homed infrastructure and large organizations supporting them. It’s used and accepted up and down the economic ladder and isn’t going to go away any time soon.
So why should you consider an alternative?
There are actually several good reasons to either augment your current use of tape or eliminate it altogether. But it all comes down to recovery. Nobody backs up data thinking they will never need it again. It’s not just an exercise in compliance.
You back up to tape because at some point, you will need to restore data that isn’t recoverable any other way. But in most cases, you will do that restore within 30 days of when you wrote it. That small fact, which ESG confirmed in a recent survey that showed that 95% of all restores are done within 30 days, belies the rationale most people use to write to tape in the first place.
The reason for that is that tape is a terrible medium to use for short term backups. It stretches, it breaks, it has a high error rate per tape, they get lost and a lot of the time and in many cases data can’t be recovered from a tape because it was either never written or because the tape has too many errors. These problems are only going to get worse as tape densities and length increase and as you put multiple TB’s worth of data on each one.
But you still need long term, as in 7-10 years worth, storage requirements for both policy and regulatory compliance issues. You are caught between two competing operational goals and are forced to accept a one solution fits all answer.
Or are you?
The answer lies in your ability to separate short term data recovery and offsite storage needs from long term archival. If you could find a way to keep a near-line copy of your data, you could satisfy your short term recovery needs. If you can retain tape as a long term archival method, even if it is at a reduced retention schedule, you can meet your long term goals and greatly reduce your costs. If you can do both, your operational readiness will increase drastically and your costs will dive.
The good news is that you can do both. By deploying CloudArray along with a tape backup solution, you can meet your short term recovery goals with on-line copies of your backups locally while at the same time keeping copies in the cloud to meet your short term offsite retention requirements, and tape copies in a warehouse to meet your very long term archival requirements.
Most backup products will allow you to keep both a tape and a disk based copy of the same data set. So your basic policy would be to do daily backups to CloudArray, thus preserving your ability to restore data meeting both RPO and RTO objectives, while at the same time running 30 day full backup cycles to tape for long term storage requirements. You can set your CloudArray backups to any schedule you choose, so you can retain daily, weekly, or monthly backups for any amount of time. If you kept daily backups for 60 days, then weekly backups for one year, and monthly backups for two years, the tape copies would never have to be touched inside of that 2 year window.
It’s the best of both worlds. Do you agree? Visit www.TwinStrata.com for more information and a free 30 day trial.
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