StorageMojo Discusses
Prospects for 70TB Tape
Editor:- January 26, 2010 -
StorageMojo, Robin Harris
published a new article today -
Will
a 70TB cartridge save LTO?
Harris's erudite analysis may provide
some comfort for those lonely few of you still entangled in the
knotty tape backup loop -
and it's a good read for the rest of us who - either already made the
transition to disk backup -
or were too young to ever use a tape (or
don't do backups).
New Integrity Tool for Old Tape Archives
Editor:-
January 18, 2010 - Crossroads
Systems today
announced
details of ArchiveVerify - a new monitoring option for its
ReadVerify Appliance
that safeguards the future readability of data
backed up on
tape.
"In our experience, the Achilles' heel of a data recovery
strategy is often the uncertainty of the data's readability, and this single
point of failure can render then entire restore process useless," adds
Bernd Krieger, Managing Director, at Crossroads Europe.
Editor's comments:- Crossroads was originally a specialist in
the SAN router business.
In recent years it has done a lot of work in the area of
storage reliability.
I've read lots of their whitepapers which describe their research and products
addressing data integrity. Although there has been a historic trend for users
to migrate away from
tape to disk backup - many super users of huge
tape libraries (with the
biggest archives) will be the last to migrate away - due to logistics and cost.
It's those kind of users who can benefit most from automated tools or services
which increase the data integrity they achieve and cut down media waste and
unrecoverable events.
Another Last Call for Tape Backup - from Storage Guardian
Editor:-
October 28, 2009 -
Storage Guardian
has launched a 'Dust-Off
Your Tapes' campaign to promote its
tape to online
backup migration service.
"We've seen tapes stacked in
basements and hidden in dusty storage closets, and it makes you wonder what will
happen when someone needs to restore that information," says Dave Minns,
client services manager at Storage Guardian. "What we're telling
small-business owners, and the resellers and managed service companies that work
with them, is that the time is right to migrate that information from those
dodgy tapes to the safety of
online backup."
History of
Migration from Tape to Disk Backup
BakBone Wakes Up to Disk Backup
Editor:- September
16, 2009 -
BakBone Software
today announced
it will change its focus from traditional
tape-based data protection
solutions to disk-based
technology with new products to be launched soon.
Editor's
comments:- BakBone is already
years behind the curve
in its reaction to the market's shift to disk backup. It's really surprising
therefore that the company has unwisely erected the information block of a
sign-up web form
ahead of saying anything useful about what it plans to do.
What can we
learn from this? Don't employ any marketers who have had anything to do with
this product launch. (Check for "Open Data Protection platform" on the
CV.)
Caringo Offers Free 4TB Cloud Storage Evaluation
Editor:-
June 23, 2009 - Caringo
today
announced
it's offering a free way to evaluate the benefits of its cloud storage -
with the release of a Windows compatible CloudFolder linked to 4TB storage.
The
company says users can drag and drop individual files or whole directories to
CloudFolder for remote storage and can also make it a shared folder. Retrieving
files is as easy as double clicking on a file or folder.
Mark Goros,
CEO at Caringo says "We believe CloudFolder will inspire users to test and
deploy private cloud storage within an organization or throughout a network of
managed service customers."
Tandberg's Tape Bust
Editor:- April 27, 2009 - Tandberg Data has
filed for bankruptcy and today announced details of its
restructuring
plan.
There's no surprise here. The current recession has merely
brought forward an inevitable event. Although Tandberg had acquired and
licensed various disk backup
technologies it remained culturally wedded to
tape.
I've
chronicled the transition of the backup market
from tape to hard disk
and in some ways it's
similar to
what's been happening in the hard disk market versus flash SSD space. But the
SSD market is more complicated - because whereas
slow cheap SSDs replace
hard drives, fast
expensive SSDs replace server CPUs.
As with
hard drives, the
highest capacity tape
libraries will remain spinning the longest. Nothing stays the same in the
storage market for
long.
Looking ahead at the next 10 years SSDs will replace hard drives in enterprise
backup systems too.
But let's get back to today's news from Tandberg
Data, whose CEO, Pat Clarke, said - "The operations of the Tandberg Data
subsidiaries will continue to operate in this new structure, with a much reduced
debt burden. The difficult steps we are taking now will enable us to build a
company that can be successful in providing data protection solutions and
support to our valued customers, suppliers, and business partners for a long
time to come"
Trawling back through
gone-away / bust
storage companies list (where the score now stands at 490 BTW) a search
for "Tandberg" reveals it had previously acquired these companies:-
LAND-5,
InoStor,
Exabyte and
Computer Design Group.
IBRIX Announces New Patents for Massive Content Backup
Billerica,
MA - December 8, 2008 - IBRIX Inc. today announced it has been
granted 2 more US patents.
The first of the new patents, "Shadow Directory Structure in a
Distributed Segmented File System" (No. 7,430,570), can be deployed in high
performing computing environments to achieve parallel data consistency checking.
The directory can also reconstruct lost data in the event of a system failure.
If a system hardware component is not working properly or a service interruption
occurs, the shadow directory ensures usability and continuity as the data
remains in a consistent state and users maintain the ability to access files.
The second patent, "Storage Allocation in a Distributed Segmented
File System" (No. 7,406,484), addresses how data is distributed across the
file system and greatly improves scalability throughout clustered enterprise
data storage environments.
Together the new patents improve the system administration
capabilities of IBRIX
Fusion, a software-only file system based on a segmented parallel structure.
Sun Launches Terabyte Tape Drive
SANTA
CLARA, CA - July 14, 2008 - Sun Microsystems, Inc. today announced
imminent availability of its first terabyte tape drive.
The
T10000B
tape drive offers 1TB of native storage capacity on a single cartridge with
120MB/sec throughput. It uses the same physical tape drive for FICON and
Fibre Channel, allowing
users to switch media between SAN
and mainframe environments. The new drive supports WORM capability and
encryption. Pricing starts at $37,000.
...Sun profile,
Tape Libraries | |
| . |
| . |
| storage history
-
tape
drives - 2000,
2001,
2002,
2003,
2004,
2005,
2006 | |
|
| A note
about the tape backup market. |
Tape Backup dropped out
of the Top 20 monthly
Storage Searches in April 2007. This resource page lists the major oems
still in the market for those of you still working with tape backup systems.
The
tape
market has been declining in revenue for many years - due to the high cost,
longer backup window and worse data restorability than disk backup. However,
some small segments at the high end of the tape market may continue due to the
high cost of migrating from legacy systems.
You can see how we
predicted and then chronicled the long transition away from tape backup in the
classic article - a
Short History of Disk to Disk Backup. | |
| . |
Tape libraries
Tape Sanitizers
How Solid is Hard
Disk's Future?
Disk
to Disk Backup versus Tape
Virtual Tape: Can You
Afford to Ignore It?
Hybrid Storage Drives
- winners, losers and maybes
Z's Laws - Predicting
Future Flash SSD Performance
Can We Predict the 10 biggest
storage companies in 2012? |
| . |
Why did the tape market
fail?
The unreliability of restoring data was a problem. The story
below is just one of many which covered the bad user experience with data
recovery from tape.
Tape Backup Fails Most Enterprise Customers
TORONTO,
Canada - September 20, 2005 - Tape backup is failing most enterprise customers
according to an online survey of IT executives, conducted over a 45-day period
commissioned by Asigra.
75% of respondents
indicated that their companies suffered unrecoverable loss of corporate data
they thought was successfully backed up to tape due to unreadable, lost or
stolen media. The survey sought to better understand how IT staffs safeguard
mission-critical information throughout the enterprise, including remote
offices, and how the backup and recovery process for the remote office/branch
office - could be improved. Among the survey findings:
- 63% said they encountered unreadable tapes when
they tried to retrieve data with 76% of those cases reporting a direct impact to
their business from loss of productivity to punishments for regulatory
compliance infractions.
- 61% said that they back up remote offices to ensure
business continuity in the event of a disaster, while 17% indicated that there
are no formal backup procedures in place at their remote offices.
- 20% of respondents said their business has
experienced data loss due to lost or stolen tape media.
- Data recovery-focused
features that respondents found valuable in ensuring a secure and smoother
backup/recovery process included keeping the latest backup version locally on
disk (93%) and encryption for data while 'in-flight' and 'at-rest' (85%).
"The results of this survey seem to indicate that
there is still a severe problem with lost corporate data at remote sites
resulting from issues regarding the reliability and security of traditional
tape-based backup systems at remote sites," said W. Curtis Preston, vice
president of Data Protection at
GlassHouse Technologies.
"Remote sites are much better served with a disk-based data protection
system that can provide local fast recovery, while automatically replicating
backups to a central site for disaster recovery."
...Asigra profile,
Disk to disk backup
Editor's
comments:- I'm not surprised by the results. Nor should you be. So why do
corporations still do tape backup?
Well market research shows that
over 70% are considering moving to
disk to disk backup - but
that will has its own problems too - which we'll write about in a later
article. Let's put this into context. How many of you have been involved in a
car crash - including small scrapes while parking?
And did it stop you
from ever sitting in a car again? Life's not perfect. Diversity in backup
technologies is the only foolproof way to make sure that you can get your data
back when you need it. But that costs more than most are willing to pay. | |
| . | |
