Analysis of the role of tape in data protection

Many people think that tape technology has become ephemeral in the field of data protection, because it was declared dead more than 10 years ago, but today, tape technology is still part of the core data protection strategy for companies of all sizes.

Recently, the rapid development of solid-state drive technology (SSD) based on Flash, RAM and its hybrid technology has brought a full stop to the disk drive lifecycle. The growing popularity of solid-state hard disk technology relieves the pressure of magnetic hard drives (HDD) and enables them to be extended to new applications, such as daily backups that were originally performed by tape.

As HDD begins to support day-to-day backups, tape can be implemented in a number of other areas and is being used as data protection, including regulatory archiving and traditional non-standard purposes, such as water-saving projects or other short-lived data applications that may be needed in the future. With the increasing and deployment of IT organizations, tape still has a wide range of application services for the foreseeable future.

In addition to backup and archiving, tape can be used to accomplish many different tasks, including near-line storage that supplements the storage capacity problem of online disk persistence and bulk processing. As disk drive storage expands, tape is still used as backup, while disk drives continue to be used for day-to-day changes, instant snapshots, and other forms of disk to disk (D2D) data protection. While simple disk vendors are still trumpeting tape cancellation, many industry leaders are constantly innovating to provide customers with disk-based virtual tape libraries (VTL), including compression, encryption, duplicate deletion, remote Web site storage replication, and disk to tape media data migrations.

Because different types of storage media have different characteristics: strengths and value trends, they are combined in some application tasks or time hierarchies in the storage model, as shown in Figure 1. The basic premise of tiered storage is similar to tiered access and tiered data protection, which combines application types and tasks at hand to meet specific service and budget requirements, taking into account specialized storage that involves cost, quality of service, and effective forms. In essence, each technology has its own uniqueness in terms of performance, availability, capacity, energy consumption, and cost. As a result, some storage media, including SSD based on RAM and Flash, as well as tape, can be used more professionally with specialized functions to optimize the value trend.

Figure 1: Storage media and media complementary tiering for different tasks

Today, although the focus of data protection is based on disk and the future and other emerging technologies, tape is still the development of the feasibility of a number of reasons: the performance, availability and expansion of tape capacity so that its cost-effective still has advantages. Tape can be easily replenished to existing systems, and tape-based solutions enable tape tracking, encryption, media processing, and the special needs of customer procurement in the marketplace.

Tape is often considered a low-tech storage method compared to other emerging or future technologies. However, the reality is that tapes are still used by organizations of all sizes to protect and save data for critical tasks. Due to the lack of high technology in the tape field, all research focused on how to increase tape density and improve product availability through the use of advanced materials, and technological and technical considerations tend to occur only in the context of disk drives or other technologies combined with low-level technologies.

Recent improvements and related technologies have enabled tape-related performance to be maintained, including increased capacity and increased reliability for a cost and physical application, as well as flexible methods for data compression and key management. From the point of view of power, cooling and footprint, tape is still the greenest and green technology in addition to the good usability and performance representation of unit capacity. Tape is also a sophisticated and reliable technology that lowers customer risk in data protection and data preservation media and improves environmental comfort.