he Backup Veteran: Tape

Does It Still Have A Place In Your SME’s Long-Term Storage Strategy? Once a dominant technology for backup in data centers, tape has become just one of the choices for storage, and it has a number of critics who claim that other media, such as disk arrays and optical media, are superior. Yet a significant number of small to midsized enterprises still employ tape for backup needs, and the media has its advocates as well, who believe that it’s a cost-effective and dependable strategy. For many data center managers, the use of tape will fall somewhere in the middle, many experts note: They can use tape for some forms of backup while opting for different media in other circumstances, such as for daily storage needs. Tape’s Future A major advancement in tape within the past few years has been LTO (Linear Tape-Open), a technology created by companies such as HP (www.hp.com), IBM (www.ibm.com), and Seagate (www.seagate.com), who got together to release a new format based on existing technologies. Now in its fourth generation, LTO-4, the specification is in standalone drives, as well as tape autoloaders and libraries, and many believe it will play a significant role in tape’s future, particularly at companies that are interested in information lifecycle management. The specification will be especially welcome at companies that have heterogeneous environments because it allows tapes written on one company’s drives to be recovered on the machines of another vendor. For example, tapes created with HP drives can be read by IBM devices. Research firm IDC estimates that LTO accounts for more than 80% of the midrange tape market. Creation of the spec has also driven capability. LTO-4 adds 256-bit AES encryption at the drive level and boosts performance over the previous generation. LTO-4 drives can operate at 120Mbps, and cartridges support 800GB of uncompressed capacity. They also support Write-Once, Read-Many capability, a feature designed to protect tape content. Strategy Strengths One of the main strengths of tape is its portability, notes Hunter Bennett, chief technology officer at Ensynch (www.ensynch.com), a provider of IT infrastructure services. Tapes can be stored offsite at another facility and perhaps even at a few different facilities that are geographically distant from each other. “It would take longer to recover from tape alone because that usually entails a cold site solution, where you have hardware and tapes sitting in standby,” he says. “But it’s possible, and many people do use that as an emergency option.” Tape can also mix into an environment where other forms of storage media are involved. Many SMEs prefer to use a combination of backup systems, sometimes utilizing third-party service vendors to help with management and software that brings components together more seamlessly. “Companies have been interested in more integrated stacks of capabilities at a lower price point,” says Brian Reagan, chief marketing officer at Arsenal Digital (www.arsenaldigital.com). Previously, SMEs would have to pay more in order to have higher levels of integration, but there’s been a shift toward more cost-effective storage management, Reagan says. Depending on a company’s needs, putting together tape with disks, SANs, mirroring, online data backup, and remote monitoring is becoming easier and more affordable. SMEs have been moving toward augmenting what they already have in place, Reagan notes, and that often includes tape systems. Rather than a storage system rip-and-replace, they fill in gaps that tape might leave. That’s causing vendors to ponder better ways of integrating tape and other media. Tape isn’t on the way out, many believe; it can be a fundamental way to shuttle data through a backup strategy. One example of a new product is the Gresham Clareti Virtual Tape Library, Version 2.0, introduced by Gresham Enterprise Storage (www.gresham-storage.com). The software lets users predict capacity allocation and uptime, with a stackable node-based architecture that allows several nodes to be virtualized into one virtual tape library image. It also lets users back up data to disk and migrate it to tape. Others have also made strides in tape innovation, with companies such as EMC (www.emc.com) previewing new virtual tape libraries. Challenges & Drawbacks As technology advances in other storage arenas, however, it’s possible that SME will use tape less often, and many could phase it out completely. The strategy has its critics, who question the reliability of tape as a long-term storage media. There are horror stories of tapes that have “gone bad” without anyone realizing until they were needed for emergency data restores, and some experts wonder if tape is just too labor-intensive. “Increasingly, businesses are protecting their local and remote site computing environments using hosted backup services, avoiding the complexities, expense, and resource drain associated with local and remote tape backup,” says Eran Farajun, executive vice president at Asigra (www.asigra.com). “Not only is tape a resource drain, but when data needs to be recovered, the restores are too often unreliable.” Also an issue is how quickly tape can be used to get a company back up and running. As an emergency strategy performed from cold site restore, it may be fine for a company that has the luxury of taking a few days to recover, but for those that have only a few hours, using only tape to get all data available to users is a challenging strategy. SMEs have been concerned about rapid data recovery, and rightly so, notes Mika Krammer, an analyst at market research firm Gartner Group. “This kind of recovery is key for operational efficiency, and some are finding that traditional storage methods like tape aren’t meeting their needs.” The bottom line for many companies pondering the use of tape is likely to be how reliable and dependable the systems have been in the past and whether it’s time to replace their hardware. A blend of strategies could make for faster recovery and fewer sleepless nights.