Can cloud storage replace tape for long-term data storage

Jon Toigo is the founder and chief executive of Toigo's Analysys, a frequent workshop at the TechTarget Storage decision makers (Storage decisions seminars and conferences) , and he is also an active advocate of the application tapes of the Enterprise disaster recovery strategy. Here, we discuss the role of tape in today's backup and disaster-recovery applications, the path of tape evolution, and whether cloud storage will replace the way tape functions long-term data preservation.

Toigo when referring to LTO's publicly released product roadmap. "One of the most exciting aspects of tape is its ever-increasing capacity," he said. "You'll soon see a set of LTO tapes that can store up to 32TB of data." ”

Currently, LTO-5-formatted tapes provide 1.5TB of standard storage capacity (3TB of compressed storage). However, the LTO Ultrium roadmap shows that LTO-6, which is due to be released later this year, will provide 3.2TB of storage capacity (8.0TB of compressed storage).

Another development stems from the linear tape file system (or LTFS) that was released last year. LTO-5 tapes can be divided into two zones, while Ltfs uses the first partition to store separate hierarchical file systems, providing data indexes stored in another partition. Ltfs is open source, so any application vendor or tape user can download Ltfs specifications from the LTO ultrium Web site.

"Structurally, tape can also be well positioned as another form of NAS," Toigo said, "in other words, all of your stale data that you're not constantly accessing can be written to a tape library, The tape library front-end uses a small disk as a flash drive to run the Ltfs. This allows you to put a massive amount of data, we mean petabytes of data, stored in a small footprint of the rack, and only consumes the same amount of electricity as a few light bulbs.

While there may be some exaggeration, the huge advantages of tape in energy efficiency are really good for long-term data storage.

But the tape doesn't solve all the problems.

Of course, backup to disk still has some very significant advantages over tape. The first advantage is backup time. Even with the LTFS technology, tape does not have a fast storage speed as a disk.

I've always advised you to back up your 30-day data to a disk in the station, Toigo said, searching for a separate file on a disk is much less time-consuming than retrieving it on a stack of tapes, which needs to be loaded before it can be retrieved. It takes longer to recover from tape in the event of a small incident.

It is generally agreed that using a combination of disk and tape is an ideal approach. And many it peers agree to use tape to store data that needs to be kept for long periods of time. However, cloud storage providers are working to preempt the main stronghold of the previous tape.

Will cloud technology replace tape for long-term storage of data?

We often hear cloud storage vendors set their services in place of tape. It can provide some attractive features, such as pay on demand, unlimited storage space, no hardware investment. And, now most mainstream backup software vendors support direct backup to cloud services backup, cloud Backup becomes more and more easy.

However, there are still many concerns about its application. I wrote a book about the 90 's application service provider, you can flip it out, and then use ' cloud technology ' to replace the word ' ASP ' in it, lack of security, lack of service level assurance, all of which limit the enterprise to outsource its work.

Toigo back to tape is not a solution to all enterprise disaster recovery strategies. There are many small businesses, they have no other way of backing up data than using Backup resources on the network, he says, but we hear a lot of promises from cloud backup vendors, such as they will encrypt your data in the background, they have a first-rate data center, but no one has ever been able to look at the scene.

Delays, disturbances, and so on are also possible problems in backing up data to the cloud, Toigo says, and you'll encounter all the common problems in the WAN, he says, and if you're backing up over a wide area network, you need to take into account the latency and disruption you might have. If you need a real 0 downtime, it's likely that data at your remote site-whether it's a cloud or your own site-doesn't match the data at your home site. This is likely to be a serious problem when restoring critical applications.

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)