Tape is Still Not Dead! Plan for Future with Tapes
Last week was an exciting week to read about tape. The general theme of the articles I read is that with all the benefits of tape, it should very much be a part of every companies’ future backup and archive strategies. Like we’ve been saying for years, tape is still not dead!
Rather, these two articles are great advocates for ensuring tape is part of your backup and archive strategy:
- ‘Free Disk? No Thanks’ by George Crump on Storage Swiss. As he prepares to fly to Fujifilm’s IT Summit, he mentions that even if disk was free, there are still reasons to choose tape over disk. One of the greatest benefit of tape is that it is cheap, and not only cheaper compared to disk, but less costly for your data center because it doesn’t require additional fees like heating, cooling, rackspace, etc.
- Big Data Supply released the exciting news that LTO Tape Assured Through LTO-10!. If this isn’t news that tape isn’t dead, I don’t know what is! LTO-9 and LTO-10 are promised to hold large amounts of data and very fast transfer rates. They also discuss additional features that demonstrate how tape is going to be more convenient and easier to use than ever before.
With tape playing a significant role in your future, managing your tapes effectively becomes a new priority when planning for your future. When choosing a solution, you should look for one that protects your data and satisfies audit regulations, works nicely with your current operations so you don’t have to spend time retraining your operators, and ultimately makes processes more efficient. With data growing and the number of tapes projected to increase, finding a solution that is scalable is also a good idea. (PSA: Not spreadsheets!)
My recommendation is to utilize both tape and disk, in order to reap the functional and monetary benefits of both methods. B&L provides a backup tape management solution, Vertices, that helps companies automate their tape tracking processes in order to effectively manage the movement, location, and retention of tapes. Features like integrating with multiple backup applications, automatic FTP of information to your offsite vendor, and having a central repository of tapes makes managing tape easy and convenient throughout your entire organization. To us, data security and compliance reign, so rest assured your data is protected and audit regulations are satisfied.
Within the application, you can also manage all other offline IT assets and track them efficiently as they move through their various workflows. That way,you have a central repository of all information like status and location on any offline IT asset and tape. Regardless of the workflow, whether it is tape movement or hard drive destruction, your organization has visibility into the processes and they can all be managed from a central application. Learn more about Vertices.
Ensuring that tape is part of your backup and archive strategy will not only be cost effective, but the technology continues to advance making tape the convenient and effective long term solution.