Adherents to the Repeated Meme

How often have you heard these two memes?

“Tape Sucks”

“Tape is dead”

Oh it just goes on and on, and on and on and on. One might think that I’m having a dig at EMC and Data Domain here – particularly in light of my response on another topic’s comment thread here. And while some folk at EMC and Data Domain would technically be in my sights on this post, there’ll equally be folks from NetApp and a plethora of other vendors who think that tape is dead. So I’m not so much picking on any company, just the meme itself.

It’s the same story, over and over again. Some new whiz-bang product comes out, and people jump onto the “tape is dead” bandwagon again. Only like a really bad villain in a superhero movie, tape just won’t die. It has more lives than every cat in the world combined.

Sure, its use has evolved over time. I’m the first to admit that. When I first started in backup myself, the notion of backing up to disk was a complete anathema. After all, I had to beg, borrow, plead and promise long on-call shifts just to get a couple of extra 2GB spindles for my backup server to handle indices and temp space. Why would I have been so crazy as to backup to such an expensive medium? Tape, on the other hand, was much cheaper.

Over time disk became cheaper and had higher capacities, but it still isn’t as cheap or as high capacity as tape over the long haul. Where it exceeds tape every time is on the economics of access. You need that data back straight away? Then it needs to come back from disk, not tape. There’s no load times, etc., when it comes to disk.

And so over time as disk became cheaper, we (the industry) evolved backups to use tape as secondary, long term or high capacity storage. Backup to disk, keep the most frequently recovered backups on that medium (i.e., the most recent), and keep copies on tape. As space fills, we shift those older backups off to tape, and keep using disk for the high frequency recoveries. Disk also smooths out those pesky shoe-shining issues we see in highly varied streaming speeds to tape, too.

So it’s a win-win solution, and it’s going to stay that way for some time to come. Tape may have evolved, but it’s still better, cheaper, and more reliable for longer term storage. Curtis Preston has an excellent summary of this point here, for what it’s worth.

Will the “tape is dead” people come around to reality? Probably not. Adherents to the repeated meme don’t always give up so easily. After all, there’s even people who still believe in a flat earth.

Addendum, April 2016.

It’s funny when you come back to an article you wrote years ago and find yourself in significant disagreement. I’m preserving the content of the article above, but it’s fair to say it’s been several years now since I’ve actually agreed with it. Usage cases for tape has been shrinking regularly, and my biggest beef with tape is that it’s rarely properly managed when it is used, making the “tape is cheap” argument lopsided and inaccurate. (So this is also proof that I adapt and change my mind from time to time.)