Though the majority of storage solution vendors tout tape-based backup as outdated and uneconomical, Oracle thinks otherwise, describing tape as the 'last line of defence'.
In an interview with ITWeb last week, Manfred Gramlich, a sales specialist for open storage and tape archive at Oracle, revealed that many businesses realise the importance of data backup as an organisation's livelihood depends on its data.
"Can you imagine a large financial institution that experiences data loss? The impact this would have on its business would be detrimental," he said.
Gramlich noted a trend in the industry of using disks for backup, discarding tape altogether, which he thinks is a risky move. "While it may be very fast to do backups onto disk, when you experience data corruption like malware or viruses, typically, they propagate across a disk infrastructure. So if you do not have a tape copy of that data that is completely offline from the actual data set, you stand a good chance of experiencing data corruption and of not being able to recover."
Tape is more robust than a disk drive, says Gramlich. "If you bump a disk drive, or if you accidentally drop a disk drive, you would have damaged that disk drive, potentially beyond repair, and it will cost a lot of money to recover that data.
"We refer to tape as the last line of defence. If all fails, the only way to recover is tape. A good example is when Gmail went down about two years ago and the only way it could recover was through tape."
Referencing a recent study by the Clipper Group, which aimed to determine the relative economic relationship of the cost of storing archived data on disk rather than tape in a large enterprise over a specified period, Gramlich said it was discovered that, on average, a disk-based backend storage solution costs much more than a tape-based solution using an automated tape library.
According to the study, the total cost of ownership (TCO) - including equipment, media, maintenance, energy and floor space - of the average disk-based solution is 26 times the TCO of the average tape-based solution. The study also found that tape costs about $1.5 million, while disk costs about $38.5 million over the same period, and that the cost of energy use alone for the average disk-based solution exceeds the entire TCO for the average tape-based solution.
Energy use for tape costs about $47 000 while disk costs about $4.9 million, and disk required about four times the floor space of tape. Thus, the more data preserved on tape, the lower the overall TCO, the study found. With 50% of data stored on tape, the TCO is reduced by 48%; with 90% on tape, the TCO is reduced by 87%.
These figures are applicable to a typical large enterprise over a nine-year period.
Gramlich added that the typical lifespan of disk is about five years, but tape can last 10 years and longer. So tape is the most economical way to store long-term data, he noted.
"This is not only because of the costs of acquisition for disk storage, but the running costs as well - the power and cooling of disk storage. For example, for a petabyte disk storage, the power and cooling alone would be equivalent to the entire acquisition cost of a tape storage system."
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