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Robin Harris – of ZDNet’s Storage Bits blog – had an article almost two years ago about a new 70TB tape demonstrated by IBM and Fujifilm. Robin’s title captured an increasing number of people’s sentiment about this story precisely – “too much, too late.” While I’ll admit that the geek in me loves the idea of any single piece of storage medium that can store 70TB of compressed data, the fact that its magnetic tape constrains its practical application pretty dramatically, save for long-term file and folder archiving. Its retirement is well-earned, many decades after it first came into prominence as the mainframe and minicomputer environment’s main bulwark against data loss. Random Access Always Wins
As we’ve discussed here before, magnetic tape’s linear access means you have to play the tape through from beginning to access the information you seek within. And when you’re looking at a monster 70TB tape cartridge, where there are seemingly miles of iron-oxide lovingly laid down on a tape binder from beginning to end, who knows how long it will take to find that single file you misplaced? Disk, on the other hand, is a random access medium and that alone offers justification to move away from tape subsystems if you’re looking for quick recoveries (who isn’t?). But just as important, disk-based imaging does more than files and folders. It also allows you to back up and recovery more than just files and folders (the biggest limitation of tape beyond the speed and accessibility issues). It also allows you to recover complete systems, with the operating system, application/s and all of the machine’s settings intact. Coupled with the right backup software, it can also be application aware, a critically important attribute when dealing with Microsoft Exchange or SQL-based application. You’ll have all the components for recovery at hand in the image, including the operating system, application/s, and all your settings – everything you need to do a recovery at any location you choose. Disk Data is Cheap For decades disk was prohibitively expensive, which, by default, made tape the only backup choice. That’s no longer the case, of course. Remaining uses for tape continue to decrease as disk storage costs continue to fall, combined with advances in file compression and data deduplication that reduce dramatically reduce disk spending to a fraction of what was once required. Backup 2.0 doesn’t have much to do with tape anyway, relying instead on disk for dramatically reduced recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs). Combined, they minimize both data loss and downtime by orders of magnitude compared to tape. So while a 70TB tape is “neat”, I think it’s likely to be relegated to storing 10-year-old e-mails in a warehouse. Discover why AppAssure’s Backup software has the "Must Have" features to reduce your storage space by 80%. Visit www.appassure.com/server-backup-and-replication/ and find out why AppAssure is #1 in Backup, Replication & Recovery.
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