Time to Start Dissing Tapes

The movement away from tape backups to disk-to-disk backups goes through phases, like all technology transitions. Initially, vendors sold the benefits (like speed) of disk-to-disk backup, while also offering backward compatibility with software originally designed to backup to tape. But now we're entering the phase of companies simply devoted to selling only disk-to-disk backups, and it's getting advantageous to simply go with the message "tape sucks!"

Witness the announcement about Lasso Logic over at eChannelLine Daily News. Lasso Logic is a San Francisco startup that selling a disk-to-disk product to VARs. No conciliatory nods to tape here, as the company rep notes that "some" companies still use tape backup "to date". If that's too subtle for you, the quotes get clearer with reference to the "growing number of customers that are sick of tape" and the claim that tapes have "over a 50 per cent failure rate during data recovery".

Extrapolating the price/performance curves of disk versus tape backups makes it clear that disk-to-disk backup is going to continue to displace tape backup. That doesn't mean, however, that companies with an investment in tape backup systems that are working just fine should dump them immediately and pay a lot of money to roll in a complete change to disk-to-disk backup. But clearly, we're entering an era where there the pressure of "cool factor" may start pushing people to migrate away from tape faster than strictly makes sense from an economic point of view. Better have your plan for sensible, phased migration ready when the CEO wants to know why you're still using antiquated tape backups!

May 07, 2005May