ST1711

OPINION: TAPE BACKUP TAPE BACKUP
IS TIME RUNNING OUT FOR TAPE?
THERE ARE FOUR GOOD REASONS TO MOVE AWAY FROM TAPE BACKUP, SAYS ANDY SYREWICZE,
MICROSOFT MVP AND TECHNICAL EVANGELIST AT ALTARO SOFTWARE
It's amazing how many IT pros we talk to
who are spending a great deal of time
working with backups. Not to say that
properly maintaining your backup system isn't
important; it's just that your backup solution
should work for you, not the other way around!
While software is one thing, it is often the case
in these situations that backup hardware,
medium included, is the cause of the time
suck. More often than not, tape seems to be a
culprit.
While tape has been great for many
organisations, it really is beginning to show its
age. When it comes to something as critical as
your backup and recovery solution, it is nice,
admittedly, to have the medium you've become
used to over the years, right? Sadly, all good
things must come to an end and we must
objectively review our solutions from time to
time. In talking with customers considering a
change, we find one of the four points below
tends to be the catalyst.
TAPE IS A DYING MEDIUM
Let's be objective here. Tape technology is
largely the same as it's been over the last
couple of decades. Sure, breakthroughs have
been made in reliability and failure rates have
been reduced, but there are many issues that
still plague tape users today. Add to this the
fact that disk storage has become very cost
effective for large data sets, and also the fact
that the public cloud is giving organisations a
global reach for offsite storage, and tape is
really starting to look less appealing.
TAPE IS CUMBERSOME AND COMPLEX
There isn't an IT guy anywhere that likes
working with tape. It's clunky, has support
issues, and requires regular physical
maintenance. Disk storage tends to be static
and "in-place" once you set it up, and requires
little attention until you have to ultimately
replace a disk (this is assuming you're not
going with a drive rotation methodology, but
even that practice is on the downturn as a
result of public cloud and improved overall
bandwidth worldwide).
RECOVERY TESTING IS HARDER WITH
TAPE
This is due to the simple task of using tape
media. You have to get tapes out of storage,
which may take time depending on their
location. You may have to swap in multitudes
of tapes to complete test recoveries, especially
if you are reconstituting the data for an entire
site. Additionally, most organisations have an
official process wrapped around the movement
of backup tapes from production to archival
locations, which consumes employee time
daily.
Altaro's easy-to-use backup software for Hyper-V and VMware, Altaro VM Backup, is
trusted by 40,000+ organisations worldwide.
GET
YOUR
FREE
COPY
Don't miss out! Scan the QR code to download your free copy or visit go.altaro.com
TAPES OFTEN FAIL
With enhancements in LTO drives over the
years, tape has become a very reliable
medium. However, due to our human
condition, many organisations do not properly
store, access, and maintain their tape libraries.
Finally, with tapes being what they are, they are
more prone to theft than a disk spinning in a
server somewhere. It's just simple semantics.
If your organisation uses tape today, there
isn't a big emergency requiring you to vacate
that medium right now. However, as time
moves on, it's going to get more difficult to
deal with the medium's shortcomings, both
technically and fiscally - especially as things in
the disk and public cloud markets continue to
improve. If you'd like to start taking advantage
of disk-based backup today you can do so by
using a solution designed with disk and cloud
storage in mind, Altaro VM Backup.
More info: www.altaro.com
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34 STORAGE Nov/Dec 2017
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