{"id":2134,"date":"2010-04-14T05:50:15","date_gmt":"2010-04-13T19:50:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/?p=2134"},"modified":"2010-04-14T05:50:15","modified_gmt":"2010-04-13T19:50:15","slug":"10-reasons-why-tape-is-still-important-part-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/2010\/04\/14\/10-reasons-why-tape-is-still-important-part-2\/","title":{"rendered":"10 reasons why tape is still important (part 2)"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the previous article<\/a>, I covered the first five of ten reasons why tape is still important. Now, let’s consider the other five reasons.<\/p>\n

6. Tape is greener for storage<\/h3>\n

Offline storage of tape is cheap, from an environmental perspective. Depending on your locality, you may not even have to keep the storage area air-conditioned.<\/p>\n

Disk arrays and replicated backup server clusters don’t really have the notion of offline options. Even if they’re using MAID, the power consumption for the psuedo-offline part of the storage will be higher than that for unpowered, inactive tape.<\/p>\n

7. Replicated tape is cheaper than replicated disk<\/h3>\n

And by “replicated tape” I mean cloning. Having clones of your tapes is a cheaper option than running a system with full replication. Full replication requires similar hardware configurations on both sides of the replica; cloning a tape requires – another tape. That’s a lot<\/em> cheaper, before you even look at any link costs.<\/p>\n

8. Done right, tapes are the best form of thin provisioning you’ll get<\/h3>\n

Thin provisioning is big, since it’s an inherent part of the “cloud” meme at the moment. Time your purchases correctly and tape will be the best form of thin provisioning within your enterprise environment.<\/p>\n

9. Tape is more fault tolerant than an array<\/h3>\n

Oh, I know you’ve got the chuckles now, and you think I’ve gone nuts. Arrays are highly fault tolerant – looking at RAID alone, if your disk backup environment is a suite of RAID-6 LUNs, then for each LUN you can withstand two disk failures. But let’s look at longer term backups – those files that you’ve backed up multiple times. Some would argue that these shouldn’t be backed up multiple times, but that’s an argument that doesn’t translate well down into the smaller enterprises and corporates. Sure, big and rich companies can afford deduplicated archiving solutions, but smaller companies have to make do with the traditional weekly fulls kept for 5 or 6 weeks, and monthly fulls kept for anywhere between 1 and 10 years will have the luxury of a potentially large number of copies of any individual file. The net result? Perhaps as much as 50% of longer term recoveries will be extremely<\/em> fault tolerant \u2013 if the March tape fails, go back to the February tape, or the January tape, or the December tape, etc. This isn’t something you really want to rely on, but it’s always worth keeping in mind regardless.<\/p>\n

10. Tape is ideally suited for lesser RTO\/RPOs<\/h3>\n

Sure if you have RTOs and RPOs that demand near instant recovery with minimum data loss, you’re going to need disk. But when we look at the cheapness of tape, and practically all of the other items we’ve discussed, the cost of deploying a disk backup system to meet non-urgent RPOs and RTOs seems at best a case of severe overkill.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the previous article, I covered the first five of ten reasons why tape is still important. Now, let’s consider…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3,5],"tags":[102,332,980,1101],"class_list":["post-2134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-architecture","category-backup-theory","tag-adv_file","tag-disk","tag-tape","tag-vtl"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pKpIN-yq","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2134"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2134\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}