Tape Triumphs Despite Bad Rap

SAN DIEGO -- Storage Networking World -- Tape was prominent at this week's SNW trade show in San Diego, contesting claims that it's being displaced by disk.

"Tape is one of those zombie technologies that's not going away," says analyst Greg Schulz of the StorageIO consultancy. (See Zombies on the Move.) "Disk vendors say it has a high failure rate on restore, tape vendors say it's great. The truth is somewhere in the middle."

Empirical evidence of the two-sided tape story was everywhere this week. One day, in a talk on its Backup Exec System Recovery product, Symantec claimed that restoring data from tape fails more than 50 percent of the time. A subsequent query at Sun's booth turned up the comment that tape restorals are more like 90 percent successful, and it's easy to create multiple copies if you're insecure.

Vendor claims aside, news at the show revealed tape's ongoing presence in backup and archiving:

All this points to a robust market, one in which vendors are determined to overcome traditional gripes about tape -- costly and vulnerable media, unreliability in terms of restoral, slow data backup and retrieval, and so forth.Tape's real entrenchment, though, comes from its widespread popularity. Lots of folk see tape's advantages outweighing its liabilities.

One user, Mike deOliveira, IT project manager with Red Gold Inc., the Indiana-based tomato products company, says his group is moving from tape to disk backup to retrieve data faster, but not because tape isn't useful. While it can take a couple of days to restore files from tape, compared to a few minutes for disk, deOliveira, a new EqualLogic customer, doesn't think tape has reliability problems. "I've always had good reliability with tape libraries and media. I can't think of a time when we couldn't recover data."

In another case, Whitney Kuszmaul, network manager for the Cleveland Indians baseball team, gave a talk at SNW about his use of Overland's REO 9000 VTL along with the NEO 4000 tape library to protect the team's video data, including at-bat coverage of every player. Kuszmaul backs up 3 Tbytes (60 days' worth) of video on tape, and intends to add two more NEO drives this year. "I've only had to touch it once, and that was last month. The import and export is very fast," he says of the NEO. As for why he uses tape backup: "Data protection has to be reliable and expandable, without bringing in a brain scientist. And of course, there's price."

Mary Jander, Site Editor, Byte and Switch