{"id":5598,"date":"2015-06-11T20:55:52","date_gmt":"2015-06-11T10:55:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/?p=5598"},"modified":"2015-06-11T20:55:52","modified_gmt":"2015-06-11T10:55:52","slug":"tales-from-the-trenches-tape","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/2015\/06\/11\/tales-from-the-trenches-tape\/","title":{"rendered":"Tales from the trenches – Tape"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m back in a position where I’m having a lot of conversations with customers who are looking at infrastructure change.<\/p>\n

What I’m finding remarkable in\u00a0every single one<\/em> of these conversations is the pervasiveness of Cloud considerations in data protection. I’m not just talking Spanning<\/a> for your\u00a0SaaS systems (though that gets people sitting up and taking notice every time), I’m talking about\u00a0businesses that are looking towards Cloud to\u00a0deal with something that has been a feature of datacentres for decades: tape.<\/p>\n

I’ve mentioned CloudBoost<\/a> before, and I personally think this is an exciting topic.<\/p>\n

\"iStock<\/a><\/p>\n

An absolute ‘classic’ model now with\u00a0NetWorker is to have it coupled with Data\u00a0Domain systems, with\u00a0backups duplicated\u00a0between the Data Domain systems and\u00a0removing of tape – at least for\u00a0that daily and weekly backup cycle.\u00a0Data Domain Extended Retention is\u00a0getting a lot of interest in companies, but\u00a0without a doubt there’s still been some people who look at a transition to deduplication as a phased approach: start with\u00a0short-term\u00a0backups going to\u00a0deduplication, and keep those legacy tape libraries around for handling tape-out for monthly backups.<\/p>\n

That certainly has appeal for\u00a0businesses that want to stretch their tape investment out for the longest possible time, especially if they\u00a0have long-term backups already sitting on tape.<\/p>\n

But every time I talk to a company about deploying Data Domain for their backups,\u00a0before I\u00a0get to talk about CloudBoost and other functions, I’m getting asked:\u00a0hey, can\u00a0we say, look towards moving our long term backups to Cloud instead of tape at a later date?<\/em><\/p>\n

You certainly can \u2013 CloudBoost is here now, and whether you’re ready to start shifting longer-term compliance style backups out to\u00a0Cloud now, or in\u00a0a year or two years time, it’ll be there waiting for you.<\/p>\n

Over time (as the surveys<\/a> have shown),\u00a0backup to disk has increased\u00a0in NetWorker environments to over 90% use. The basic assumption for years had been\u00a0disk will kill tape<\/em>.\u00a0People say it every year.\u00a0What I’m now seeing is\u00a0Cloud <\/em>could very well be the enabler for that final death of\u00a0tape. Many businesses are entirely killing tape already thanks to deduplication: I know of many who are literally\u00a0pulling their tapes back from their offsite\u00a0storage vendor and\u00a0ingesting them back into\u00a0their Data\u00a0Domains \u2013 particularly those with Extended Retention. But some businesses don’t want to keep all those long-term backups on local disk, deduplicated or not \u2013 they want a different economic scale, and\u00a0they see Cloud as\u00a0delivering that economy of scale.<\/p>\n

I find it fascinating that I’m being so regularly asked by people:\u00a0can we ditch tape and go to Cloud<\/em>?\u00a0That to me is a seismic shift on the remaining\u00a0users of tape.<\/p>\n

[Side note: Sure, you’ll find\u00a0related links from me below about tape. Just because I wrote something 1-3 years ago I can’t change my opinion \ud83d\ude42 ]<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m back in a position where I’m having a lot of conversations with customers who are looking at infrastructure change.…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3,1229,16],"tags":[230,1249,980],"class_list":["post-5598","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-architecture","category-cloud","category-networker","tag-cloud","tag-networker","tag-tape"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t