Legacy tape access

Unlocking backup data in support of data center consolidation and litigation

Developments of the week in storage

Retaining legacy tapes in order to comply with corporate legal policy has become a real problem for IT administrators – they stack up in closets, storerooms and at off-site service provider locations. 

Tape storage vs. disk storage

You can't recycle them or destroy them because the lawyers say you can't – you might need the information on them for litigation or because of regulatory compliance. But you have no idea what data is on them and how useful it is to your organization -- they are just the results of hundreds of full and incremental disaster recovery backups you've done over the last so-many years. And, that's a lot of tape – Storage Strategies NOW estimates that tape has 25 times the volume of disk because of the backup rotation methods – grandfather, father and son – used to back it up and protect it.

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Retaining legacy tapes in order to comply with corporate legal policy has become a real problem for IT administrators – they stack up in closets, storerooms and at off-site service provider locations. 

Tape storage vs. disk storage

You can't recycle them or destroy them because the lawyers say you can't – you might need the information on them for litigation or because of regulatory compliance. But you have no idea what data is on them and how useful it is to your organization -- they are just the results of hundreds of full and incremental disaster recovery backups you've done over the last so-many years. And, that's a lot of tape – Storage Strategies NOW estimates that tape has 25 times the volume of disk because of the backup rotation methods – grandfather, father and son – used to back it up and protect it.

The problems associated with retaining tapes, and recovering them if necessary, is compounded when the impact of business mergers or acquisitions is considered. Once a merger takes place two (or more) data sets have to be managed, including inherited sets of tape, potentially created by different backup processes on different equipment. In the merger of your organization and 'theirs,' you'll be tasked with consolidating the storage infrastructures and the data from both organizations. Streamlining access to backup data and consolidating the backup infrastructures will also be a challenge.

Nonetheless, the amount of information stored on tape is overwhelming companies and IT resources. Companies can easily have tens or hundreds of thousands of tapes sitting in offsite storage. Although it costs only a few dollars to store data on tape, new tapes must be purchased each year to support ongoing backup. Degraded tapes must be replaced with new media. Off-site service provider storage must be retained. And, legacy backup software and tape systems must be kept and the skill set maintained if you ever have to retrieve data off the tapes. Companies can easily spend hundreds of thousands or millions of annual IT dollars, depending on the volume of legacy tapes, on this effort.

In the event that your organization has to retrieve data from tape for litigation, data consolidation through merger or acquisition or migration to a new backup platform, the burden falls on you, the IT administrator.

Traditionally, you've had to recover data from tape using often outmoded or unfamiliar backup software and archaic tape subsystems. That is a time-consuming process as you well know that is complicated by the fact that little of the data recovered will ever be needed for eDiscovery. You can expect to spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars to extract the data you need from tape. Storage Strategies NOW estimates that it costs an IT department around $2,000 to process and restore a single backup tape – and that expense adds up with each backup tape you need to process.

The amount of time to restore a tape depends on a number of factors including the tape technology employed, the interface used (SCSI or Fibre Channel), whether data is compressed and the block size of the data being backed up, the number of files that need to be recovered and the consistency and reliability of the media.

Deni Connor is principal analyst for Storage Strategies NOW and host of both the Masters of Storage and Masters of Servers Solution Centers.