How to use tape in cloud storage

Cloud storage is a technology in cloud computing, and people are not too new about it. Many people think that cloud storage is synonymous with disk, high-performance disk, or Tier-1 disk and data deduplication. There is not a minority of this idea, in fact, this is entirely a misunderstanding of people, cloud storage is not the case at all, but it is precisely because of this misunderstanding, it can understand why Google Gmial account data recently using tape storage controversy and Surprised. Of course, tapes will continue to play a vital role in cloud storage, cloud backup, and cloud archiving, even if that's the wrong idea. As to why this happens, we must first understand the importance of cloud service providers to overcome the key barriers to tapes in an online, highly available environment. Cloud computing is a good example.

The term "cloud" has become a household word, and it is often difficult to distinguish between what and what type of cloud service is being discussed when using this term. In these cases, cloud storage is a broad concept, including private clouds, hybrid and public cloud architectures, and whether storage is for primary storage, archiving, or backing up. Essentially, the "cloud" is the storage and access of data through a broad approach or public network, whether the data is managed within the enterprise (private cloud) or by third parties (public cloud). Cloud service is a cost model regardless of implementation. For companies that use cloud services, they provide flexible capacity and performance without significant up-front capital investment. For cloud service providers, the system is flexible to build and ensure proper protection and service, or SLA, to maximize profitability.

When discussing the cloud, there are many features that should be discussed, including multi-tenancy, security, data integrity verification, recovery expectations, and exit policies. Non-repudiation, this is the ability to ensure that all copies of a set of data are deleted without being processed. Out of consideration of the concept, it should be quickly and clearly defined. It is an almost impossible standard to ensure the non-repudiation of an online or even digital environment because most system designs can easily create copies without limiting or guaranteeing their deletion. Multitenancy - Ensuring that your customers' data is independent of each other and who has no access to others - this is at the core of cloud storage, where individuals use cloud storage images or backups, which may not be mainstream features. However, it is crucial for all businesses to migrate legitimate and sensitive information to the cloud, ensure data security, and make it accessible to anyone, whether accidental or malicious.

Multi-tenancy is often managed at the hardware and software level, regardless of the layer where the data is stored. However, from a hardware point of view, this may be more difficult than expected. Every addition of functionality to protect and compress data inadvertently complicates things. Deduplication, RAID, and thin provisioning all make it possible to save costs or protect the power of a disk. Unfortunately, these techniques often involve breaking data at the block level and reassigning it, or deleting it based on metadata tables. This means that it is very difficult to accurately identify a given file in a storage unit. For example, just a disk defragmenter running on your computer can see the fragmentation of a single drive. Many systems have to deactivate smart programs to ensure that different customer data is independent of each other.

However, using tape, this problem is much simpler to solve. Each LTO tape is a readable and writable physical separation object. And compression can increase the tape capacity. Finally, end users or service providers use natural separation to have complete control over all given tapes. For customers who need further isolation, many libraries can be divided into hard partitions, multiple, separate libraries that are accessible and present on the network. Therefore, tape is a perfect medium for infrequently accessed and modified data.

Tape provides a different technical distinction from disk systems, and off-line backup addresses security and data protection issues. In this era of smartphones, Wi-Fi, satellite and other online technologies, it's easy to understand the less relevant offline copy. However, virtually all online data is extremely vulnerable to data corruption, malicious attacks and even accidental deletion. Why? Online data, as the name suggests, must be readily readable. Data protection is a calculated set of risks that can not provide absolute security, like snapshots, continuous data protection (CDP), replication, and RAID technology. If the file is damaged in any way, this damage does not affect copy, mirror and backup. February 2011, Google Gmial error shows that a small software error will have a catastrophic impact on online data production.

Fortunately, tapes are removable and contamination within the system never affects tape outside the library. Tapes remain the silent guard behind the back end of any smart-plan storage system, insisting on minimal tape storage management. Another advantage of tapes is the much cheaper cost of creating and maintaining extra copies compared to disk systems. To ensure that multiple copies of the data can be stored in multiple places, secondary copies can also recover the data, has achieved the purpose of preventing data loss.

Tape also provides an essential capability for cloud storage strategy: exit strategy. If customers need to pull large amounts of data out of the cloud or access data beyond the available bandwidth, mobile media can be sent back to customers without data loss. In addition, media can be physically moved to another location without the need to create a high-bandwidth channel between service providers and customers for clean data migration.

While I really want every cloud service provider to see the benefits of tape storage, in fact, the misunderstanding that tape is not for the cloud still exists in their minds. Storage disk vendors have been believing tapes have died for more than a decade. Why? Tape threatens their disk sales. Tape availability, portability, density and power consumption help control business costs.

Cloud storage vendors often adopt a tiered storage approach that uses high-performance disks at the front end to meet customers' high-performance needs and tape-based storage at the back end. This approach to meet customer needs at the same time, but also to provide more business profit-making point. So tape will benefit cloud storage services both from a business perspective and from a technology perspective, and this response is taken into account when we evaluate specific cloud storage service providers.

Author: Chris Marsh, Spectra Logic's IT market development manager.

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