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| 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 when we discontinued our coverage of tape drives in 2007.
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. | |
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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. | |
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