Good ol' tape will survive cloud era, too!

Even after being on the 'death bed' for several years now, tape refuses to die and only redefines itself every time a new storage technology comes in. Going forward too it will

Features | by Deepa Damodaran

BANGALORE, INDIA: They said disk drives (HDDs) will kill tapes. Then, they reckoned solid state disks (SSDs) will definitely 'eliminate' them. And now, they feel tapes will not sustain the cloud era. Still, the good ol' tape refuses to bow.

While some would like to term cloud - also considered to be synonymous to disk drives - as the beginning of the end of tape era, there are others who would argue that the relevance of tape has only increased thanks to cloud, which, according to some others, is not a rival, but a complementary technology to tape.

Shuja Mirza, head, Pre-Sales, North India, EMC, says, "This is the beginning of the end of tape era. We see tape acceptability declining for commercial organizations. People want information instantaneously and that is possible only when it is on disk in the back-end. If you do that with tape devices in the back-up, the response will be slow. If restoration takes 30-35 minutes, that information is as good as being not available. Moreover, backing up that information onto a tape device is virtually impossible."

Another oft-stated argument against tape is that it has many moving parts, therefore provisioning it becomes difficult.

"You can club tapes with software, which can allow you to provision protection for your online data, however, back-end tape infrastructure still becomes very bulky and stiff to respond to business SLAs. One can do block level de-duplication, compression, and stuff on tape, but if data is spread on multiple tapes, for a single file recovery, one has to pull out four or five tape libraries, which is not agile. Almost 80-90 per cent of the total time taken for recovery is wasted in identifying the right tape, aggregating it, mounting it on tape library and aligning it to the right position before starting the retrieval process. Moreover, there are chances of data loss on tape. Therefore tape is on the decline as far as its acceptability is concerned," argues Shuja.

Disk proponents argue that when it comes to performance, disks stand out. However, Rohit Vig, director, Storage Sales, Oracle India, points out that tapes can perform much better than disks today.

"Many people are discovering that the 20-year-old adage that 'disk always performs faster than tape' does not ring quite as true in today's cloud-based storage architectures, where the performance of enterprise-class tape robotics and tape formats with file-system-like accessibility may surpass the performance of MAID (massive arrays of idle disks) subsystems, at an appreciably lower price," Rohit adds.

Tape shipment has been on a decline over the past couple of decades. However, it is also true that while it has reduced, its share is still many times more than that of disks. Guna Sekaran R, country manager, India & Sri Lanka, Quantum, notes that despite the growing popularity of cloud storage, tape back-up is still a vital part of an effective back-up strategy.

"Cloud still requires tape as a complementary technology. Until now, data centre managers wanting to protect data in the cloud had two basic options. Either they had to choose storage array-based replication to and from the cloud that provided fast back-up and disaster recovery, but made it extremely expensive to implement, or they had to choose cloud-only solutions, which were less costly to implement, but demanded a rip-and-replace approach and made the process of restores very slow," adds Guna Sekharan.

One argument against tapes have been that data retrieval from them is slow. However, there are some who decline to buy that argument. Barun Lala, director, Storage, HP Indianotes that downtime may still be tolerated, but not data loss.