One of the most famous quotes of Mark Twain is: “Rumours of my demise have been greatly exaggerated.” The quote aptly fits in the case of tape. Rumours of tape's demise have been greatly exaggerated. If some industry hype is to be believed, tape has become a thing of the past. However, tape, as a data protection solution, continues to be relevant, especially for SMEs.
It is true that tape is being replaced for day-to-day backups by disk and online solutions, but it doesn't go away entirely. Since disk-based, online, and cloud storage and backup solutions become more cost-effective and readily available, the role of tape in the enterprises is undergoing change.
It is said that some things do not really change in IT. The same can be said about tapes that have continued to evolve and survive as a preferred mode of storage despite significant evolutions in disks.
It may be possible that some smaller SMBs have already moved away from tape or have never used tape at all. But in the case of larger SMBs, a hybrid of tape and other technologies is being used.
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Chee Beng Ong, Vice President, Storage Sales, Asia Pacific, Oracle Corporation
We have actually seen a shift of customers who have used disk exclusively for backup now going back to a combination of disk and tape. As a complement to disk, Tape helps control costs, energy consumption and address security with encryption:
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Tape Option
Data is growing at an unprecedented rate and this growth rate is putting extreme pressure on corporate IT departments, responsible for storing this new data. “We have noticed that most of our customers are doubling their data every two years, but their budgets (if growing at all) are not growing at a 50% per year,” says Chee Beng Ong, Vice-President, Storage Sales, Asia Pacific, Oracle Corporation.
Not only are we required to store increasing volumes of data today, we are also required to ensure a far longer life for all the data that we store. Regulations require financial companies to keep emails for seven years or more. Healthcare agencies are required to preserve data for the life of the patient and longer. The result: storage requirements are exploding and there appears to be no end in sight.
The other important aspect of data is the frequency with which it is accessed. While there has been an exponential growth in data volumes from the storage aspect, not all data is required to be accessed with the same frequency. The majority of this data is very seldom accessed. Enterprises are, therefore, faced with the two-fold challenge of storing huge volumes of data and ensuring optimum storage utilization to attain maximum efficiency - all arising from the need to store data for a long period of time that may be accessed with varied frequencies.
“Not all data is created equal. As data ages, it is not utilized as often and so it makes pure financial sense to offload less accessed data to cheaper storage media. Tape is the least expensive storage media on the planet. Not only is tape cheaper to buy, but it is cheaper to own over time with 230:1 cost savings in space, power and cooling,” says Ong of Oracle.
“Bit rot” is the gradual decay of the storage media over time. In simple terms, this is about maximum shelf life. For disk, the figure is 10 years, whilst for tape, considerably long at 30 years.
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Syed Masroor, Head Pre-Sales, NetApp India
We see Tapes to continue being used for archival, unless the customer compliance is a consideration. In that case 'worm' enabled disk based backup solutions are the best bet. The only benefit that tapes may offer over the other backup solutions is lower cost:
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The Cost Advantage
While disks have been undergoing evolution with prices of disk drives dropping, making disk an attractive option for some tape-based applications, the same is true for tape as well. Tape vendors continue to develop and deliver large tape cartridges, reducing the cost per gigabyte. This makes the cost differential between the tape and disk unchanged over the years.
“Tape continues to figure significantly into IT infrastructures for high-capacity storage backup. Its unique attributes can help users manage their storage requirements and contribute to the ever-present value of tape in the storage hierarchy,” says Sandeep K. Dutta, Vice-President, Storage, Systems and Technology Group.
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Sandeep K Dutta, Vice President, Storage, Systems and Technology Group, IBM India/ South Asia
Tape continues to figure significantly into IT infrastructures for high-capacity storage backup. Its unique attributes can help users manage their storage requirements and contribute to the ever-present value of tape in the storage hierarchy:
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Reducing Energy Costs
When evaluating whether to use tape or disk as storage devices, some customers may focus on the initial acquisition costs, but fail to think about other costs, such as electrical costs, that can add to the cost of storage over several years. Storage hardware costs are decreasing every year. However, customers have few choices when it comes to electricity. They do not have the option to go to another energy provider. The only way they can control energy cost is to choose storage wisely.
“Power consumption continues to be a growing problem for many customers and when data is not being used, it should be on devices that consume no power... which is tape and not disk. Even when data deduplication is taken into account, tape is still five times less than disk,” says Ong.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- TAPE BACKUP IS FAR FROM DEAD. Its role in the SMB has shifted to long-term storage and archiving.
- LONG-TERM STORAGE APPLICATIONS like digital archives, fixed content, multimedia and compliance well suited for tape.
- WHEN TAPE IS USED FOR ARCHIVING, its reliability greatly improves.
- FOR LARGER SMBs, solution providers should consider a hybrid disk/cloud and tape backup solution.
- FOR SMALLER SMB CUSTOMERS, a solution based entirely on disk and/or cloud storage may make the most fiscal sense.
Compelling Advantages
The reliability of tape and its media has also increased significantly over the past decade. Enterprise-class tape drives now have MTBFs of over 400,000 hours and cartridge design along with media formulation is substantially better improving the system's overall reliability.
The efficiency of a storage administrator is far greater with tape when compared to disk. A single storage administrator can manage up to 1 PB in an automated tape library versus 100TB of disk.
Security has been a big issue with tape or any removable media for that matter. We have all heard of a number of instances of lost tapes forcing companies to publicly report the loss. Oracle offers the most flexible encryption solution available making this a non-issue.Compliance can also be addressed with Write Once Read Many (WORM) media for our enterprise-class drives and LTO.
“Bit rot” is the gradual decay of the storage media over time. In simple terms, this is about maximum shelf life. For disk, the figure is ten years, whilst, for tape, it is considerably long at 30 years.
Long-term storage applications like digital archives, fixed content, multimedia and compliance are ideally and economically well suited for tape.
“We have actually seen a shift of customers who have used disk exclusively for backup now going back to a combination of disk and tape. As a complement to disk, tape helps control costs, energy consumption and address security with encryption,” says Ong.
Tape Challenges
The primary challenge with tapes is that their performance has not kept pace with the rate at which data has grown in the datacenter. As a result, they are no longer a viable option for primary backups. The restore speeds from tapes are even slower as tapes allow only linear access compared to disks which are random access. “Tape as a media is unreliable and also it is extremely complex to verify backups on tapes. NAS & SAN are primary storage solutions, whereas tapes have always been used for secondary (backup) storage. Having said that, we see tapes to continue being used for archival, unless the customer compliance is a consideration. In that case, 'worm' enabled disk-based backup solutions are the best bet. The only benefit that tapes may offer over the other backup solutions is lower cost,” says Syed Masroor, Head - Pre-Sales, NetApp India.
Today, there is need to ensure better, efficient and secure storage and data management solutions that can really provide the competitive advantage to the companies and especially the SMBs that are on the threshold of immense growth cannot overlook the fact. IT leaders realize that the decisions they make today will not only impact how they compete now, but also affect the long-term success of their businesses. Customers are rethinking on their IT infrastructure needs and evaluating alternatives to cope with the new realities of today's business growth and pace.
“Due to these reasons, the tape industry is witnessing a consistent degrowth. Almost all datacenters undergoing transformation are aggressively adopting disk-based backup solutions to mitigate the challenges associated with backup windows, reliable restore and compliance,” says Masroor. He adds, “There are legacy applications and processes in all industry verticals which are still dependent on tapes. It is, however, only a matter of time before even these organizations make changes to their backup processes and adopt disk-based backup solutions.”
“Tape also has some disadvantages since the back and restoration is time consuming and due to the usage of cartridges it is often subjected to physical damage which leads to data loss. The tapes are high maintenance due to high wear and tear,” says Sandeep.
Finally...
The growing importance of SMBs is certainly good news for tape. Tape continues to be the most cost-effective, flexible and scalable medium for high-capacity storage backup for SMBs. There is less of an initial investment than other formats and tape is easily transportable for outside sharing.
For more contact: Deepak Singh
edit@varindia.com
