Tape vs. Cloud: No Contest
It’s not King Kong vs. Godzilla. And it’s certainly not an epic encounter, as the upcoming Mayweather vs. Pacquiao bout promises to be. In fact, tape vs. the cloud is more like UFC fighters Ronda Rousey against Cat Zingano–it’s no contest. That’s why companies are transitioning more and more data off tape and placing it on the cloud.
Take TruePosition, a 140-employee manufacturer of location intelligence solutions with nearly 100TB of data. Keeping backup on tape required a dedicated staffer to troubleshoot system failures, label and rotate tapes for off-site storage, and regularly care and feed the tape jukebox.
For example, it used to take up to 48 hours to initiate a restore by the time the right tapes were located and retrieved; that same operation happens in near real time with Zetta.net. According to Erick Panger, TruePosition’s director of information technology, “You right click, copy and paste, and you’re done.”
Panger said he spends about 2 minutes reviewing a backup report, and when he doesn’t see any errors, he moves on and “goes about his daily business.”
When you translate that into the world of the managed service provider (MSP), the time savings really add up. With the backups of scores of customers to deal with, the last thing you want is several staffers constantly bogged down in backup administration, maintenance and troubleshooting.
Tape: Failure Points
But time isn’t the only factor. The mechanics of tape make it susceptible to a host of potential failure points.
Let’s review some of these briefly.
Tape drives can fail, the media surface can become damaged, and tape media can sometimes get stretched or even break. But even if those failure points don’t exist, you may not get a decent backup due to common factors, such as backup corruption. The number of ways that a backup can mysteriously be unavailable on backup tapes is legend. Perhaps the job was interrupted and never completed, or maybe the tape didn’t have enough capacity. Random CRC errors quite often lead to corruption. And then there are operational factors, such as not having a cassette in the drive, failing to schedule the backup or cancelling the backup job for various reasons.
But let’s suppose the backup was successfully accomplished. You have the data you really need on tape. But which tape? Cataloging and tracking challenges haunt many tape repositories. Where on earth is that tape that contains the CEO’s deleted PowerPoint? Is it with Iron Mountain, and how long will it take them to ship it to us? Or do we have it internally, and, if so, where? It can take days for the right tape to arrive on site. Case in point: During Hurricane Sandy in 2005, a company had its backups in a cabinet in downtown Louisiana and couldn’t get to them for almost a week, despite having a standby site up and running within 24 hours.
Gone in 14 Seconds
Like the recent Ronda Rousey vs. Cat Zingano UFC fight, any argument between tape and the cloud as the best place for backups would be over in 14 seconds. And instead of it taking days to attempt a restore off tape, 14 seconds is about the length of time it would take to find the CEO’s presentation and restore it using Zetta.net.
Art Ledbetter is director of channels at Zetta. Guest blogs such as this one are published monthly, and are part of MSPmentor’s annual platinum sponsorship.
