* The dwindling role of tape in IT backup
This time out, we consider the dwindling role of tape in IT backup.
Tape has been a part of the IT backup scene almost since the get-go. It has always offered the virtues of being cheap and easy to handle, although if truth be told there has always been too much handling when it comes to tape. Still, many present day IT managers likely got their start as tape handlers (at less kind shops, “tape monkeys”) when they were young and worked the third shift.
Today, in many instances disk is as cheap as tape, a fact that has not escaped the vendors. Last month, for example, Iomega and Tandberg released new backup solutions based on removable hard disks. The Iomega REV drives either are available in a stand-alone configuration or built into an autoloader, with drive cartridges coming in 35-Gbyte and 70-Gbyte models. The Tandberg offering, based on a different technology called RDX, is licensed from ProStor and may be either external (hanging off a USB bus) or built into a 3.5-inch device bay. RDX comes with 40-, 80- and 120-Gbyte SATA disk cartridges – larger cartridges will be available next year. Last week Dell also announced adoption of the RDX format for shipment with its server products.
Both REV and RDX are designed to replace current low-end tape technologies such as Travan, DAT, and AIT, and at least one of them is likely to succeed. Both will significantly outperform low-end tape devices, and both are positioned as midrange (and perhaps, SMB) solutions. Additionally, their disk media will outlive tape media by wide margins.
Putting this in context, the software to support disk-based backup is also coming online in a big way. All major backup packages now offer disk-based backups. Most recently, two weeks ago Symantec announced Backup Exec 11d, its backup and recovery software for SMBs. Note that the “d” appended to the revision number in this case stands for “disk,” as this is the company’s first release to include disk-specific functionality such as continuous data protection.
All this new functionality reflects a growing understanding of the value of disk-based backups on the part of IT managers. It is now clear that in many (most?) cases disk-based systems are faster than tape; that the disk media is much easier to handle when offline and acting as an archive; and that either near-line or offline, the data is significantly faster to recover.
Serial ATA (SATA) disks has been the great enabling technology that provides the hardware underpinning for this. Now those disks have both several new hardware implementations and new, state-of-the-art applications plugging them in to the backup infrastructure. Cheaper hardware, improved software and faster operations on both the backup and recovery ends mean that the backup-to-disk option has now become a lot more viable for a lot more managers.
