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Recent Sales Hint That Tape For Storage Is Far From Dead
hightechchick writes "Staples' business-to-business sales of backup tape for storage are experiencing a bit of a revival. What's next, a return to dumb terminals and mainframes (a la cloud computing)?"
What else is there? It's not like you can back up to a SAN, and then stick the SAN in a courier bag and send it to remote storage.
In fact you can. With a DR site you can replicate the backups to a remote SAN.
/. Yokel #1> But I have TiB(s) of data. It would take more than 1 day to backup 1 TiB over my WAN.
/. Yokel #2> Haha, you burned that last guy. But seriously, even my deltas are fairly large.
/. Valid User> Does this even exist.
You don't do a full back up remotely. Intelligent software will transmit only the incremental. If you want you can locally seed the remote site before deployment.
Seriously, source side de-duplication and compression. In most work environments the amount of net new data is not very large.
For serious people willing to pay: Avamar and Datadomain are examples. I don't know about the FOSS space though. If there were I would be interested in.
Tape is legacy.
It's difficult to restore from, sometimes you need the full and all accumulated incrementals.
It's difficult to know if data is even safe until you actually perform a test restore which NO ONE does on every backup.
It's inefficient. You can't just re-use parts of a tape.
Managing tape libraries is a needless nightmare.
Investing in a legacy architecture should result in a beating.
You need better software, there should be near 0 time searching.
Bacula is pretty cool.