Is tape for data protection really dead? There are more than a few people in the industry who seem to think so. Even the tape industry often positions tape as being for archiving rather than data protection. Moreover, there is certainly any number of organizations that have moved to disk and cloud based solutions for data protection and either abandoned tape or relegated it to archive use only. However, in the long run, this may prove to be a shortsighted move.
A Brief Look Back
Tape, as a data storage medium, is a technology that is over 60 years old. It was first used to backup data from a Univac system back in 1951. It continued to be used for backing up data from various large computer mainframe systems that replaced the Univac systems. From there tape based backup migrated into the distributed computing platform as individual PCs (Personal Computer) began to proliferate and get networked together in order to share expensive disk space for storing data produced from all those PCs.
As time went on and data quantities began to grow, tape technology evolved to meet ever-increasing storage capacity and throughput speed requirements. By the late 1990s however, while tape met capacity needs it seemed to reach a point at which it struggled to meet expectations of backup and recovery performance. In most cases, this was not a design flaw in tape itself but rather in the backup architecture. Tape requires continuous feed for maximum performance and the architecture in the late 90s couldn’t provide that.
Tape is shown the Door
As recovery times became even more critical than backup times, various vendors started offering high-speed disk systems for backup and recovery purposes. These early disk systems initially emulated tape drives and libraries. However, as these disk systems continued to evolve they left tape emulation behind and began offering sophisticated, robust features such as replication, data compression and deduplication. Eventually they would also add snapshot capabilities, which at that time were only available on primary storage. These technological advancements further enhanced disk appliances capacity and performance to the point that they began pushing tape out of the data center. However, this capacity and performance came at a price, as organizations had to purchase more and more disk, which still cost more than tape. This cost trade off was acceptable then but now data is growing more exponentially than ever causing the costs of disk storage and management to grow significantly.
The advent of cloud technology seems to address these new cost concerns, however by extending an organization’s storage and even data protection resources at a fraction of the cost they would face if they continued to handle this growing load in-house. It seemed that tape would soon be obsolete and unnecessary in an organization’s plans for data protection, and even archiving.
Beyond the Silver Lining
While cloud technology does provide a lot of capabilities and valuable features, it also has some hidden costs that are not always obvious and could result in additional significant costs beyond the advertised $/GB price. The actual costs for cloud storage depend on the terms of the cloud storage provider’s service contracts, which are still fairly complicated, and often include charges for different types of data storage, data access and movement. These additional fees can significantly increase the cost of storing ever-increasing amounts of data for indefinite periods.
In the meantime, tape technology has continued to evolve and we now have LTO 6 tapes available with a capacity of up to 6.25 TB per cartridge and a transfer rate of 400 MB/s while the cost has dropped to $0.8 cents per GB. In addition, unlike cloud, once you buy that capacity, you own it; with the cloud, you are renting it.
In our next installment of this series, we will take a closer look at these various cost factors as well as several other important factors that need to be considered in order to make an informed decision on whether or not tape still has a place in an organization’s data protection strategy.
Joseph is a Lead Analyst with DSMCS, Inc. and an IT veteran with over 35 years of experience in the high tech industries. He has held senior technical positions with several major OEMs, VARs, and System Integrators, providing them with technical pre and post- sales support for a wide variety of data protection solutions. He also provided numerous technical analyst articles for Storage Switzerland as well as acting as their chief editor for all technical content up to the time Storage Switzerland closed upon their acquisition by StorONE. In the past, he also designed, implemented and supported backup, recovery and encryption solutions in addition to providing Disaster Recovery planning, testing and data loss risk assessments in distributed computing environments on UNIX and Windows platforms for various OEM's, VARs and System Integrators.
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