You have not proven that live backups are only HA and not backups Live backups can do everything you said under backup. The concept of a backup to to make a copy of the data and have it in a different location, be it in another folder to replicated across the world.
I am curious, do you really get 3TB compressed from 1.5TBs? I always was told that is a best guess and never rely on getting (in this example) the full 3TBs.
Sexconker, you have limited knowledge outside tape technology. Compression, Deduplication, seeding remote sites are all viable and currently use methods for backups. The two products Starscream mentioned (Avamar and Data Domain) use these technologies and there are many more
You can also compress anything and put it on floppies, usb drives, flash, SD cards, zip drives, etc and hard drives.
Deduplication is a backup mechanism. It is a way to reduce the amount of storage needed to store files on a SAN. Compression is already used with deduplication just like its used on tape. With these two items, you could run a full backup which takes tape 8 hours to do will take dedupe and compression 5 minutes.
Restoring from tape is a not the easy process as you make it out to be. You need the full backup tape, then the tapes for each incremental backup. All on the same tape? Rescan the whole tape, restore full backup, rescan tape, restore one of the incrementals, etc. With hard drive based systems, its always online, easily available and simple.
You can replicate data that is on hard drives, a WAN is a wonderful thing, and those fantasy items like deduplication, compression and remote seeding really come in handy during it. Replicate it your backups to another site, remote. If your data centers aren't in locations that attempt to protect against the basic Earth, Fire, Wind, Water, and Heart (thieves) etc problems then you have other issues.
Why must the backup be unpowered? Tapes can fail when being read after a long period of time of being offline just like any other storage device. Store a tape for 7 years and see if it works. If my device is powered all the time, it can take me less time to implement a DR and I can detect failures and fix them proactively, not reactively. I don't know about you, but transportation times to get tapes back from one site to another doesn't sound too practical to me.
Other technologies have issues too. Hard drives fail, that is why we have RAID. Servers fail, that is why we have RAIN. If a tape breaks, there goes all your data. Hard drive failed, data is rebuilt from parity. Server breaks, data is still on disk, unaffected.
Tape can and will be a nightmare. Mislabel a tape? Lose a tape? Tape gets physically damaged? You seem to require all these add-ons for tape just to sort and manage it. It seems excessive.
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You have not proven that live backups are only HA and not backups Live backups can do everything you said under backup. The concept of a backup to to make a copy of the data and have it in a different location, be it in another folder to replicated across the world.
I am curious, do you really get 3TB compressed from 1.5TBs? I always was told that is a best guess and never rely on getting (in this example) the full 3TBs.
Sexconker, you have limited knowledge outside tape technology. Compression, Deduplication, seeding remote sites are all viable and currently use methods for backups. The two products Starscream mentioned (Avamar and Data Domain) use these technologies and there are many more
You can also compress anything and put it on floppies, usb drives, flash, SD cards, zip drives, etc and hard drives.
Deduplication is a backup mechanism. It is a way to reduce the amount of storage needed to store files on a SAN. Compression is already used with deduplication just like its used on tape. With these two items, you could run a full backup which takes tape 8 hours to do will take dedupe and compression 5 minutes.
Restoring from tape is a not the easy process as you make it out to be. You need the full backup tape, then the tapes for each incremental backup. All on the same tape? Rescan the whole tape, restore full backup, rescan tape, restore one of the incrementals, etc. With hard drive based systems, its always online, easily available and simple.
You can replicate data that is on hard drives, a WAN is a wonderful thing, and those fantasy items like deduplication, compression and remote seeding really come in handy during it. Replicate it your backups to another site, remote. If your data centers aren't in locations that attempt to protect against the basic Earth, Fire, Wind, Water, and Heart (thieves) etc problems then you have other issues.
Why must the backup be unpowered? Tapes can fail when being read after a long period of time of being offline just like any other storage device. Store a tape for 7 years and see if it works. If my device is powered all the time, it can take me less time to implement a DR and I can detect failures and fix them proactively, not reactively. I don't know about you, but transportation times to get tapes back from one site to another doesn't sound too practical to me.
Other technologies have issues too. Hard drives fail, that is why we have RAID. Servers fail, that is why we have RAIN. If a tape breaks, there goes all your data. Hard drive failed, data is rebuilt from parity. Server breaks, data is still on disk, unaffected.
Tape can and will be a nightmare. Mislabel a tape? Lose a tape? Tape gets physically damaged? You seem to require all these add-ons for tape just to sort and manage it. It seems excessive.