It’s funny sometimes seeing attitude adjustments that come from various companies as they’re acquired by others.
One could never say that EMC has been a big fan of tape (I’ve long since given up any hopes of them actually telling the 100% data protection story and buying a tape company), but at least they’ve tended to admit that tape is necessary over the years.
So this time the attitude adjustment now seems to be coming from Data Domain as they merge into the backup and recovery division at EMC following the acquisition. Over at SearchStorage, we have an article by Christine Cignoli called “Data deduplication goes mainstream, but tape lives on“, which has this insightful quote:
Even Shane Jackson, director of product marketing at Data Domain, agrees. “We’ve never gone to the extreme of ‘tape is dead,'” he said. “As an archive medium, keeping data for seven years for HIPAA compliance in a box on a shelf is still a reasonable thing to do.”
That’s interesting, I could have sworn I have a Data Domain bumper sticker that says this:
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not here to rub salt into Data Domain’s wounds, but I would like to take the opportunity to point out that tape has been killed more times than the iPhone, so next time an up and coming company trumpets their “tape-is-dead” story, and some bright eyed eager and naïve journalist reports on it, remember that they always come around … eventually.
To be fair it actually says “Tape sucks. Move on!” 😉
Which is true for the most part.
The “only” reason tape lives on is that we have little option. It is still cheaper and easier to store.
I wish for a backup software vendor that “gets” disk/tape cloning/replication on the hardware layer/et cetera
Is that to much Santa?
I agree that they didn’t literally say “tape is dead”, but the point is that it’s interesting to watch Data Domain realign as they learn that backup is more than just dedupe.
As for tape only living on because we have few other options, I don’t necessarily agree. I agree that we do await a replacement for tape, but it’s not going to be disk – it will need to be some other removable media solution. Replication never provides sufficient layers of protection IMHO, so while solutions can look at reducing the daily use of tape, tape will remain in use for the forseable future. (I.e., I’d suggest you might want to ask Santa for something that can be given this year…)