{"id":620,"date":"2009-06-27T12:55:15","date_gmt":"2009-06-27T02:55:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nsrd.wordpress.com\/?p=620"},"modified":"2009-06-27T12:55:15","modified_gmt":"2009-06-27T02:55:15","slug":"thinking-green-think-tape","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/2009\/06\/27\/thinking-green-think-tape\/","title":{"rendered":"Thinking green? Think tape"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Many companies are now becoming increasingly aware of the importance of either achieving <a title=\"Carbon Neutrality\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Carbon_neutral\" target=\"_self\">carbon neutrality<\/a>, or at least being as green as possible.<\/p>\n<p>If your company is trying to <em>think green<\/em>, then let me ask you this. For long term backup storage, which of the following two is likely to be more energy efficient?<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Writing backups to tape which is then stored in a temperature controlled room,<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>or<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Writing backups to disk arrays which are kept in temperature controlled rooms and permanently running.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Much has been said of late about deduplication this, or deduplication that, and I&#8217;ll agree \u2013 deduplication is a valid and important emergant technology in the field of backup and recovery. But it&#8217;s not a silver bullet, <em>regardless of how many disk storage vendors want it to be<\/em>. The problem is that many of the deduplication\u00a0products currently touted are ineffectual at high speed &#8220;tape-out&#8221; operations, and thus, rely on keeping backups on-line on disk \u2013 with replicas maintained to another location. That&#8217;s a whole lot of spinning disk.<\/p>\n<p>The simple fact of the matter is that not only is <em>offline tape<\/em> <strong>safer<\/strong> than spinning disk drives, it&#8217;s <a title=\"Power efficiency of tape\" href=\"http:\/\/esj.com\/articles\/2009\/03\/31\/tape-green-role.aspx\" target=\"_self\">also considerably more power efficient<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>I want it clear here \u2013 I&#8217;m not arguing that all backup should go exclusively to tape. There&#8217;s a middle line between green and practicality that remains necessary to be walked, meaning that more frequently accessed backup for many companies needs to be in some disk form initially.<\/p>\n<p>Long term backups, archives, and offsite copies however are all forms of backups that should be on <em>green<\/em>, <em>safe<\/em> technology \u2013 and that&#8217;s tape.<\/p>\n<p>If you want to<em> think green<\/em> in your datacentre, <em>think tape<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Many companies are now becoming increasingly aware of the importance of either achieving carbon neutrality, or at least being as&hellip;<\/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":[5,16,17],"tags":[360,411,980,985],"class_list":["post-620","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-backup-theory","category-networker","category-policies","tag-energy-efficiency","tag-green","tag-tape","tag-tape-vs-disk"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pKpIN-a0","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/620","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=620"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/620\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=620"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=620"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=620"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}