Wednesday, January 9, 2013

Do Large Corporations Need Tape?

I am dealing with a situation where I have to gone from a tapeless TSM environment to the standard TSM tape model and I have to wonder why you would use tape when you have multiple data centers? If you have multiple data centers why not backup to disk and replicate the data on disk to a disk solution at the alternate DC? I did this with Data Domains and it made life so much easier. Multiple DR tests showed it was efficient and successful, of course this also utilized deduplication so disk usage and costs didn't get out of hand.  So I ask why is any large corporation still using tape?
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5 comments:

  1. verminJanuary 10, 2013 at 7:24 AM

    As far as I am concerned, I can see two tape usage options:
    1) tape is always an choice for a long term archiving solution,
    2) tape gives physical feeling of having a backup. Ok, just kidding (partly). Tape gives option to revive server directly from tape. And sometimes bringing tape backup to secondary location is much faster then putting it "on wire", when the wire is broken.

    For me, tape is a security blanket. Compared to storage prices, having such blanket giving another layer of security proves not be too expensive.

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  2. AnonymousJanuary 10, 2013 at 10:49 AM

    Hey Chad. I am still at the same job, ahem. And we are still using tape for the most part, as we can get the libraries for free from the "reuse/recycle" whatever bins we have here. You know the ones. They are old school easy. Customers still like it. They bitch when SAN goes bad, ask why we didn't have a good tape sol'n. O_o Anyway - regarding that replication option, about to dive into that one. But I do have some questions on it - maybe you can answer? Are you doing it site to site now? How are you liking that option? Seems like a better way, right? Any caveats?

    -Chef.

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  3. AnonymousJanuary 15, 2013 at 9:58 AM

    GreenIT?! The most energy saving solution for storing offsite data

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  4. AnonymousMarch 4, 2013 at 2:00 PM

    cost

    ReplyDelete
  5. AnonymousMarch 6, 2013 at 4:53 AM

    Advantages of tape over disk were Cost, Poratbility and reliability. The only thing disk overcame is cost ... remaining two are still there

    ReplyDelete

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