The tapes are dead? Tape usage techniques in cloud storage

Cloud storage is synonymous with disk, high-performance disk, or Tier-1 disk and duplicate data deletion. There are a lot of people with this idea, and it has reached an alarming number. This is not the case at all, but it is because of this misconception that the recent controversy and surprise over Google's use of the Gmail account data for tape storage has come to light.

However, tape will continue to play a vital role in cloud storage, cloud backup, and cloud archiving, regardless of the view. To understand why this is happening, it is important to first understand how cloud service providers can overcome the key barriers to tape in an online high-availability environment. Like cloud computing.

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, mixed cloud and public cloud architectures, and storage for primary storage, archiving, or backup. In essence, "cloud" is the storage and access of data in a broad way or public network, whether the data is managed by the Enterprise (private cloud) or by a third party (public cloud). Whether implemented or not, cloud services are a cost model.

For companies that use cloud services, they provide flexible capacity and performance without the need for significant upfront capital investment. For cloud service providers, the system is flexible to build and ensure appropriate protection and services, or SLAs, to maximize profitability.

When discussing the cloud, there are a number of features that should be discussed, including: multi-tenant, security, data integrity validation, recovery expectations, and exit strategies. Non-repudiation, which is the ability to ensure that all copies of a set of data are deleted without being processed. For the sake of concept, it should be quickly and clearly defined. It is an almost impossible standard to ensure the non-repudiation of online and even digital environments, since most systems are designed to easily create replicas without limiting or guaranteeing their deletion.

Multi-tenant-ensures that the customer's data is independent of each other and no one has access to others-this is the core of cloud storage, where individuals use the cloud to store pictures or backups, which may not be the mainstream feature. However, it is vital for all businesses to migrate legitimate and sensitive information to the cloud, ensure data security, and whether it is an accidental or malicious attack, inaccessible to any other party.

Multiple tenants are often managed at the hardware and software levels, regardless of the level of data storage. But from a hardware standpoint, this may be a lot more difficult than you might think. Every feature added to protect and compress data inadvertently complicates things. Data deduplication, RAID, and thin configurations, all of which cost savings, or the power to protect disks, is possible. Unfortunately, these techniques often involve breaking down data at the block level and reassigning it, or deleting it from a metadata table.

This means that it is difficult to accurately identify a given file within a storage unit. For example, just run a disk defragmenter on your computer to see the file fragments of a single hard disk. Many systems have to deactivate intelligent programs to ensure that data for different customers is independent of each other.

But using tape, the problem is much simpler to solve. Each LTO tape is a physically delimited object that is readable and writable. and compression can increase tape capacity. Finally, the end user or service provider uses natural separation to have full control over all the given tapes. For customers who need further isolation, many libraries can be divided into hard partitions, and multiple, separate libraries are accessible and present on the network. As a result, tapes are a perfect medium for infrequently accessed and modified data.

Tape provides different technical differences from disk systems, and offline backups can address security and data protection issues. In this era, smartphones, Wi-Fi, satellites and other online technologies make it easy to understand that offline replicas are less relevant. In fact, however, all online data are extremely vulnerable to data corruption, malicious attacks and even accidental deletion. And why?

Online data, as the name suggests, must be readable at all times. Data protection is a series of calculated risks, such as snapshots, continuous data protection (CDP), replication, and RAID technologies that do not provide absolute security. If the file is corrupted in any way, the damage does not affect replication, mirroring, and backup. February 2011, Google Gmail error shows that a small software error will have a catastrophic impact on the online data production.

Fortunately, the tapes are removable and the contamination in the system will never affect the tapes outside the library. As long as the minimum tape storage management is adhered to, the tape remains the silent defender of any intelligent planning storage-system backend data. Another advantage of tape is that the cost of creating and maintaining additional replicas is much cheaper than for disk systems. To ensure that multiple copies of the data can be stored in multiple places, and that secondary replicas can recover data and have been used to prevent data loss.

Tape also provides an essential capability for cloud storage strategies: Exit strategies. If the customer needs to pull a large amount of data out of the cloud, or access data beyond the available bandwidth, the mobile media can be returned to the customer without data loss events. In addition, the media can be physically moved to another location without the need to establish a high-bandwidth channel between the service provider and the customer for the data to be cleaned and migrated.

While I would like to have every cloud service provider see the benefits of tape storage, in fact, the misconception that tape does not fit the cloud still exists in their minds. Storage disk vendors have been believing that tapes have died for more than 10 of years. Why not? tape threatens their disk sales. The availability, portability, density, and energy consumption of tapes can help control enterprise costs.

Cloud storage vendors tend to use tiered storage to meet the high performance requirements of their customers on the front end, while using tape for storage at the back end. This way in meeting the needs of customers, but also to provide enterprises with more profit points. As a result, tapes will benefit cloud storage services, both at the business and technical levels, and when we evaluate specific cloud storage service providers, this should be considered carefully.