Tapes find secret identity in storage centers
One of the biggest technology trends this year is likely going to be big data. More information experts than necessary have thrown their hats into the big data ring, calling it the face of the data center for the foreseeable future, and while that in itself may seem like the root of the problem, the difficulty many think firms will experience may largely be anchored in the conspicuous absence of backup tape management tools. Fervid migration to the cloud could wind up sabotaging some organizations as they now scramble to rebuild their old archive and solid-state resources.
TechTarget wrote that many companies are still standing firm amongst their backup tapes, though these deep-state storage utilities may have taken on a different face and practicality in the corporate world. Unlike in the past where tape tracking and hard disk management were the only ways to store information on a daily basis and recovery times could be at a crawl should an outage be extensive enough, now businesses are coupling modern innovations like virtualization and flash media to the mix, boosting processing and performance times.
Sidekick or superhero?
Where tapes fit in is usually in a supporting role, the source wrote. Medical institutions are relying on these assets to protect the hard copy versions of their everyday files, citing the security and stability of these resources as their needed presence in the electronic medical records age. This ensures that, in cases where lack of encryption, device loss or external attacks can compromise cloud and virtual drives, backup tapes are being maintained in a remote archive capacity, so that in a clutch, there is always a guaranteed basic copy available for disaster recovery purposes.
“Hard disk evolution is faster, which means what you use today may not be in use two years from now and you will have to revisit and re-archive the data again and again every two years in the new formats,” said Martin Hingley of IT Candor. Relying on a constantly-rotating arsenal of data management devices can put the stability of corporate records at risk, in short. Having a stable backup image and maintaining that over time is easier to do when the database picture remains relatively the same at its roots.
While it’s fine to build new infrastructure on the consumer-facing level, providing tools that integrate with cloud and mobile deployments need a firm backing in tape management. While the face of tape tools may have changed in the corporate landscape over the past few decades, these assets are still valuable heroes in disguise.