How to cut costs with backup tape management solutions
Let’s face it – any kind of storage costs money. What matters is how well it works and whether the return on investment is as great as it possibly could be.
That’s what’s made backup tape solutions so popular for so long, even allowing it to continue competing against more modern types of tools like disk, flash, virtualization and cloud. The age of LTO and high-capacity tape has helped encourage the ongoing usage of this system, as more space for the same price is far better than most any other resource can offer.
Expanding boundaries
The LTO shift has given tape backup and archive solutions a much bigger leg up in the cost-per-capacity race. As The Register reported, the more recent iterations of this hardware allows for 120TB of compressed space, with 1,100 MB/sec of raw throughput and more than twice as much compressed throughput.
For a single fixed price, this allows organizations to determine the volume of content and the rate at which it is transferred. Other tools require that changing the overall capacity also demands a shift in overall cost, such that scaling up content or adding on more storage can quickly become inhibitively expensive.
Increasing savings
It’s easy to see how companies can improve their savings just by sticking with a solution that’s efficient to maintain and cost-effective to continue to use, even as big data and network expansion continues to escalate.
Of course, there are other elements to the savings bracket than just sticking with what’s already there. As AFCEA Online reported, some of the best ways to improve savings include:
- Backing up to tape
- Archiving to archival tape from backup tape
- Optimizing existing infrastructure
- Opening up options for mobile and virtual expansion
- Comparing long-term cost per year
- Eliminating cost compounding
The source showed that there’s about a 1 to 3 cent per gigabyte price tag to cloud storage each month. Backup tape management cuts that total expense by roughly 10 to 30 percent, allowing for much more manageable cartridge costs, whether it’s in administration, vault management or operational oversight.
As companies find themselves at the receiving end of more compliance and regulation demands from the federal government, it makes sense to work with a solution that’s easy to oversee and organize. Taking action early, getting backups in order and creating optimal archives all saves money in terms of audits and eDiscovery cases later on down the road.