In his article “Tape Makes a Comeback in the Era of Big Data” on IT Business Edge, Arthur Cole says tape is still a viable storage option.

The need for bulk data storage at a relatively low cost has led many companies to take another look at tape, even though experts have predicted its demise for nearly a decade. Tape’s biggest drawback is the perception that it represents old technology, so how could a professional data operation rely on anything as antiquated as tape?

Well, initial deployment costs are 75 percent lower than disk, and operational costs have dropped seven-fold over the past five years. And since data is saved across all manner of virtual and cloud infrastructure these days, the type of underlying hardware has become largely irrelevant. Tape’s speed and storage space is impressive too. The latest Linear Open Tape (LTO)-5 format boasts 1.5 TB of capacity with transfer speeds now exceeding 100 MBps, more than twice that of SATA RAID-5 and RAID-6.

Since tape will only probably be just one part of the storage environment for most companies, it’s important that they choose a storage solution that can navigate across tape, disk and cloud tiers. This will help maximize cost efficiencies and keep tape alive for another decade.

Tape has been the most common method for backing up data for years, popular because of its relatively low cost.  With data security becoming a more pressing concern and the emergence of new disaster recovery concepts, many people are quite rightfully asking whether this is the end of the road for traditional backup and recovery, as we know it.

On-site tape backup is what we would call the “high deductible” insurance plan.  Files are backed up to magnetic tape and the tape is stored on-site.  This is a riskier insurance plan because it doesn’t protect your data from a physical disaster that destroys your facility.   If your data center crashes, your data is backed up and can be restored.  If a natural disaster or a fire occurs, however, your data will likely be destroyed.

This is why many companies choose “cold site” tape backup.  With this option, your data is backed up to tape and then the tape is trucked to an off-site location, which we call the disaster recovery “cold site”. This offers you an extra layer of protection and the peace of mind that your data will be restored if a disaster hits your physical location.

There are a couple of big down sides to tape backup: security and recovery time.  In recent times, tape backup has received some negative press with stories of vanishing data at some of the largest financial institutions.

In addition to the security risk, tape backup is known for its time-consuming and cumbersome recovery process.  In many cases, the cost involved in recovering data from tape is so high that it makes more financial sense for a company to purchase new disks for data storage than to restore from tape.

Many companies have turned to a hybrid tape/disk backup solution (D2D2T) where critical data is backed up to disk for rapid restore.  For disaster recovery, the critical data can be copied to tape and a second copy produced for off-site storage. Less critical data can be staged to disk and then written directly to tape. D2D2T enables administrators to stage less mission-critical data to tape over time and ensure that critical data is available for a much quicker restore.

With a sharper focus on security and decreasing tolerance for downtime, many organizations are wondering if tape alternatives are better-suited for backup.  Of course, these alternatives come at a much higher ticket price.

Check back next Wednesday, April 21st for our next post: Disaster Recovery Options – Data Replication.