If you believe some industry hype, tape is yesterday's data protection solution. And the adoption of back up to disk is outstretching tape…
While newer disk drives with higher capacities and lower costs are an attractive first-line backup solution, tape solutions still deliver the most cost-effective, reliable all-round solution for archiving business information.
The truth is, you don't buy tape because it's "a hot new technology." You buy it because of five key attributes:
- Tape is a robust and portable medium that enables easy offsite storage of data for disaster recovery. Features such as WORM and hardware-based data encryption provide the additional security of protected data at rest and in transit.
- Tape is space and cost-efficient for longer-term storage. We know you are facing the challenges of escalating volumes of data, increased compliance with data retention legislation and space constraints in the data centre. With LTO, you can now store up to 3.0TBs of compressed data on a single LTO-5 data cartridge.
- Tape has a long lifespan with a proven shelf life (of up to 30 years for LTO media) for reliable long-term archival. This is vitally important when you are challenged with complying with legislation that generally requires that data must be retained for longer.
- Tape storage offers highly cost-effective storage and is great value for money. In fact it is still one of the lowest cost per gigabyte medium to hold your archive data-with LTO-5 media delivering a cost of 5 cents per gigabyte.
- Tape continues to innovate providing for growth. Large companies like HP are continuing to invest money into tape roadmaps that develop bigger, faster and more secure tape drives to ensure that there's a future for tape that will provide growth and investment protection.
Predictions of tape's demise have been around for numerous years...and yet the tape market is thriving and tape itself continues to evolve.
Tape will still have a place to play in backup, but will naturally augment a D2D backup solution for speed and simplicity and has to be re-thought for virtualisation environments.
Are your backup windows running in business hours? Contact us to see how a pragmatic approach to backup and speed up your backup and recovery plans.