Is tape on the way out?

The old technology has proved remarkably resilient despite the fact that the trend towards disk backup would seem to herald the death of tape. Tape drives increasingly take second place when it comes to backups. Timing is everything, and deciding when to make the switch is not as simple as it would at first seem. The shifting emphasis towards disk backup was first emphasized by Nexsan Technology when they released their first product the Nexsan ATABoy.

Inexpensive SATA hard disk drives and new appliances are stirring up considerable interest in disk-to-disk backup technologies. Only when both the hardware and software form a carefully tuned system, do customers reap the benefits of enhanced reliability and speed when making their backups,

The backup window; the time available to save data is becoming increasingly tight and the quantity of data that needs saving is growing by leaps year after year. Tape manufacturers have not succeeded in increasing performance to keep up with this growth. Users frequently complain about the fact that tape devices attached to the infrastructure are neither sufficiently fast nor reliable. But these concerns are not always enough to sway a business decision. It is important to note that companies do not regard disk-to-disk backup primarily as a means of reducing costs, but rather as a flexible intermediate layer for backing up data faster and, above all, for accelerating the restore process of current data.

Competitive comparisons between disk-to-disk backup and conventional tape backup are constantly being made, but customers do not see it like this. More often than not, consumers do not want to rely solely on disk-to-disk backup, so it is used as a supplement as opposed to a replacement to tape.

In the traditional backup environment, data flows from the production server to the space dedicated to disk backup, once there, it is archived, modified and cleaned up. The data is then sent out to tape libraries to be permanently archived on an offline, or even offsite, support system.

This strategy of high-speed backup and recovery is called disk-to-disk-to-tape (DDT). This approach has its advantages as it reduces time and it significantly cuts the time spent cleaning up files.

As for security; backup disk solutions now offer Raid functionality which provides added protection to tapes, ensuring the integrity of data even where one or more disk drives are lost.

As for Virtual Tape Libraries, everything is transparent, and the backup software does not "notice" any difference between an LTO and a SDLT drive. These VTL appliances pass themselves off to the backup software as a tape drive or a library. Quantum's DX Series falls into this category. The greatest advantage being that implementation is in many cases quick and easy and the backup software does not even have to be supported. 

Another option seen more frequently in RAID arrays; in lieu of all the files to be backed up and then transferred to the target medium one after another, a snapshot is taken, thus a virtual copy of the volume. The data blocks remain untouched, only the details of their position in the file allocation table (FAT) are duplicated. The benefits are obvious for all to see: The process lasts from just a few seconds to a few minutes, depending on size. Data can be restored from the snapshot, by the administrator and in some cases by the user.

Major tape library vendors such as IBM, Quantum and Overland Storage have increased their portfolio of products to include disk-based backup products.

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