Companies don’t need to pick between tape and disk
Cloud technology is gaining proliferation, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad news for tape. Backup tape vendors are excited about the way technology is evolving to provide better instant-access tools for data usage. It might be because these entities understand that the cloud doesn’t cause them to falter. If anything, it provides backup tape management with a more solid grounding in companies around the world.
Tape does the happy dance
To say that backup tape vendors are happy about the rise of cloud storage and its subsequent archival face-plant would be an understatement, according to The Register. It seems that tape library and storage specialists were nearly jubilant at a recent StorageNetworkWorld hardware event, wherein these providers rejoiced in the fact that most new forms of technology like cloud, block storage and every other medium in between don’t stack up with tape’s tiering abilities.
Eric Haas of ARMS, a records management facility in Wisconsin, wrote for the Green Bay Press Gazette that tape has proven itself several times over to be more reliable and less expensive than other options. With that in mind, it is also scalable to fit big data requirements and plays well with hard disk, Flash and other physical memory devices that many companies were once more fond of. Finding their way back to these roots could save businesses a fair amount of money, not only in actual storage costs, but also in security and continuity principles.
The great tape debate
Tech gurus have been squabbling back and forth about whether tape is dead or not, and now that new solutions like holographic storage, nanotubes and glass-written information are being revealed, hard disk and solid-state drives are being added to the short list of gadgets that get bad-talked.
However, these devices provide the basic eDiscovery and continuity protection that businesses crave, Backup Technology wrote. With so much readily-accessible information hanging around in the cloud, companies still need a safe place to store mission-critical program files, accounting records, operations snapshots and other data crucial to continued well being.
In short, organizations don’t need to give up tape or abandon the cloud. They need to find a happy medium, a way to balance the old with the new, so that their secure storage remains just that but their day-to-day files are easier to retrieve and share.