Television backup tapes get much needed update
Sometimes you may get cravings for a nice lamb gyro or some souvlaki. You probably don't have a massive hankering for Greek television, though, even if its newest tape management solution will make it easier for them to maintain and access information if you should suddenly feel like watching.
Greek television station AlphaTV recently updated its backup tape solution to better accommodate its growing archive of programs. The new tapes offer more storage with a smaller physical footprint, making them easier and cheaper to store. The new high capacity, high performance tapes will improve accessibility of video files much easier and means more data can be stored in a smaller amount of space than previously necessary.
AlphaTV said in a statement about its move to new data storage that its previous solution was hefty but impractical, storing nearly 20 years of documentaries, comedies, dramas and miscellaneous content. The television station was previously using a library of Sony Beta SP video cassettes, far more difficult to manage and track as well as more susceptible to deterioration.
"Tape is faster and more reliable than it used to be," said IBM's Sanjay Tripathi in an interview with The Sydney Morning Herald. Tripathi went on to say that transfer rates and storage capacities were superior to other backup solutions and significantly less expensive to acquire and maintain.
Storing data as old as AlphaTV means archiving years of video, but seeing as they probably won't need a sitcom episode from 1999 in the near future, it isn't a big concern for the company that it might take a bit longer to retrieve that data than if it were immediately accessible. Still, the point of setting data to archive is that it's still essential for media management, but the company doesn't need to have it as part of their day-to-day solutions.
Backup tape is still superior to disk in many ways for long-term storage, including compression and retrieval times as well as maintenance overhead, but it's an archival tool and should be a part of a business continuity plan. Knowing when to move files from intranet systems or regular circulation will be up to an individual business to decide. In AlphaTV's case, backup tape management will work out much better than keeping thousands of old tapes around.
It seems only logical that you would build your defenses before an enemy invasion, or work on the walls of your house before you tried to put the roof on, or really just put your pants on before you tried to zip and button them, but for some reason businesses insist on not building up their disaster recovery or properly checking that the system is in place and working effectively before a dangerous event happens.
A review of disaster preparedness in the Eastern hemisphere, specifically the business continuity practices of Asia and Japan after last year's intense earthquakes and tsunami, found that many of them were struggling to pick up the pieces despite media management and backup tape solutions. More than 80 percent of businesses aren't confident they'll be able to recover their data, even though 44 percent are using tape management. Most cited hardware failures as the reason for not getting their systems back online in a timely fashion, causing increasing amounts of lost productivity and cutting business output and revenue.
Other Japanese companies have found success in getting their operations back online quickly. Toyota actually expects to triple their profits almost directly thanks to disaster recovery. Due to their preparedness, the auto manufacturer was able to resume production quickly and is now putting out more than a third more product than it had prior to the fallout in order to make up for lost time. Even if a business stumbles in other areas, it should recognize that one of the most valuable assets it has when it comes to day-to-day function is the data stored in computers and servers. Leaving it out in the open means there may be no way to get things running again if something like a flood or power surge were to damage physical hardware.
Putting a business back together after a terrible natural disaster can be a difficult process, but the alternative can often mean totally closing the company's doors if there can't be any data recovery. The fact that more than 50 percent of companies insist on not reviewing their disaster recovery plans until after an incident occurs seems counterintuitive. It could be an awareness issue, or simply a matter of not giving the IT budget enough balance. EMC found more than a quarter of business only spend 5 percent or less on information recovery plans.
Virtual headaches aren’t getting any better
Recently hVault announced they may be able to help Princess Leia: They've invented holographic data storage. That may be good news for Obi Wan Kenobi, but for the IT professionals still trying to wrap their heads around virtualization, it may be too much and too quickly.
A 2012 IT Manager Survey found that 90 percent of respondents were still having a hard time figuring out how to perform backups in their new virtualized data management systems. The study noted that this is a five percent increase from last year's figure, meaning the problem is just getting worse as time passes. Almost half said they were experiencing more expenses due to trying to meet the challenge of data storage they didn't understand, and a quarter were banging their heads against making their different kinds of storage and software work in the new virtualized server environment.
"The survey shows that while organizations are adopting virtualization as part of their data center, they often run into unforeseen challenges with data protection," said Quantum's Robert Clark.
Tape management software doesn't really run into that problem. While it also won't project a tiny woman out of an astromech droid, half of businesses think it's still the most reliable form of storage, according to an IT Web survey. Backup tape keeps archives nice and secure outside of the range of online attackers or confusing infrastructure.
More concerning really is another part of the IT Web survey that says about half of all businesses aren't partnering their backup solutions with other kinds of business continuity protection, meaning those 90 percent of virtualized companies already with headaches over how to use their servers may start having heart attacks if any sort of web-based attack were to come in and steal their data or just put them offline. The 25 percent in the IT Manager Survey struggling to make their systems work together seem to be the ones already popping aspirin and considering the implications of not getting their backup tape to work with the virtualized systems.
Regardless of the kind of storage your business utilizes, it's important that your IT team can actually implement it in a way that makes it worth the time and money.
Deduplication not as silly as it sounds
The drive of modern business is to find a way to make every processes easier, better and faster. Using backup tape is safe and reliable, but not everything needs to go to the archives. A good option might be finding a balance between tape management software and deduplication processes to help your business locate what's worth keeping and what's ready to go in the garbage.
Essentially, to 'dedupe' is to put a fine-tooth comb to your data cache and see where the redundancies are hiding. It's like taking a fistfull of M&M's and going through them over and over until you only have one of each color left, representing the unique data, and gobbling up the pieces that are really just copies of the originals. Deduplication may not be as delicious as eating a bag of candy, but it can be as satisfying for data compression and tape management. If you run deduplication while performing a tape backup, it's a double whammy of time and cost saving; don't store things you don't need to, but take the same amount of time or less to do it.
Managing active and archived information and keeping it free of redundancies will cut down on the amount of storage being used and also makes data easier to find, as it saves you from having to sort through multiple copies. Some packages like Vertices Tape Management System will allow users to schedule job tasks and increase the scope of storage space, giving users a better grasp of their tape management situation, but exercising smart data selection is still essential. In other words, while the system will give you ease and flexibility, it's up to the user to ensure that garbage isn't getting fed in.
Using a variety of programs and strategies has always been key to business continuity planning. Even day-to-day operations should try to incorporate the best set of solutions possible to make their backup tape function at its peak for the company, and taking steps to better understand and manipulate the data contained therein will give businesses a grasp of what their physical data load really needs to look like. Smart management will lead to better disaster recovery should the time come.
Digital tape turns 60
Happy birthday, digital tape. You're not old enough to retire just yet, but a lot of people have seen your AARP card and think we don't need you anymore. Before you go shuffling off to Florida, though, we'd like to review how you're still in the game.
It's safer
Yes, not only is buying tape space cheaper but maintaining it is too. Think about all those people you have sitting around poking through your cloud. How well are they trained? How well are they certified? Do you know all of them personally? Even if you can personally or professionally vouch for your entire IT department, risks are still apparent, as a breach can run you more than $7 million into the hole, and that's just for the data you know you've lost.
It's cheaper
If you're storing a terabyte of information, you could do it with tape management for about $20, or you could do it with SATA memory for $120. Then you can pay to multiply that by all your storage needs, plus the physical footprint all those drives will need for storage and maintenance, and the bottom line starts to get considerably higher. Sure, you could put everything to the cloud in an online program like Google's Vault or the like, but then you're putting all your sensitive data online where every hacker in the world can access it, as opposed to written on an encrypted backup tape where it would take nifty thieves to capture the information.
It's disaster-ready
Imagine your office gets hit by a hurricane, a tornado, a flood, an earthquake, a massive power outage, a tsunami, a blizzard or a bomb. Okay, maybe not a bomb. But if your computers are destroyed and you need all of your files restored once your operations are back online, how do you intend to get that petabyte of data back? Ted Stevens's analogy of the internet as a "series of tubes" helps illustrate just how tedious and unrealistic that process is. Business continuity could mean the difference between a huge loss, as about half of all businesses that lose their data will have to close or file for bankruptcy.
If you've got tape backups you can just have it all mailed to you. Go ahead and hit your 'easy' button.
