Disasters happen, though, and you'd better have data stored off-site. Sending tapes off-site is the least expensive protection against a catastrophe, but it means at best a one-to-two-day recovery target. Going tapeless means replicating data to a disaster-recovery site, collocation facility or vaulting provider. Although it's cost-effective for most critical applications, sending tapes off-site weekly may be good enough, and a lot less costly, for others.
Using these strategies, midsize companies can live without tape backup; archiving, however, is another matter. Except for a tightly regulated industry like financial services, archival storage often means keeping an occasional full backup on the shelf, or at a records-storage facility, for several years. Keeping such long-term data on disk means totally rearchitecting the archival storage procedure, or having 20 to 30 times as much disk space in the archive arrays as in your production arrays. While possible, it comes with its own power and cooling challenges.
One seldom-considered advantage for tape is that tapes on the shelf are immune to software-inflicted damage. If backups are exclusively on a disk array, and the backup server--driven by a virus or other computer psychosis--deletes or corrupts the file system on the array, all your backups are gone. Daily backups to the disk pool, along with the occasional copy to tape, should let you sleep better.
The bottom line: Hang on to your existing tape libraries and use them for archival and offline copies. Tape shouldn't be the first line of defense, but it makes an excellent fall-back defense--one you shouldn't be without.
Howard Marks is founder and chief scientist at Networks Are Our Lives, a network design and consulting firm in Hoboken, N.J. Write to him at [email protected].
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