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In-house tape vs cloud archiving: What are the pros and cons?

By Chris Evans

Tape has been the medium of choice for backup and archive in enterprise organisations for more than half a century. This isn’t surprising, as magnetic tape has been at the forefront of data storage since IBM released the first tape drive 60 years ago in 1953.

But, now the cloud has begun to offer more compelling solutions and the opportunity to use cloud archiving services and to dispense with traditional in-house technology.

Are we near the tipping point where tape could be supplanted by cloud archiving in the enterprise?

Archiving fundamentals

Many organisations make the mistake of retaining data backups and calling this an archive. But, backup and archive are very distinct and have separate requirements.

Backup provides recovery from unexpected data loss (user error, data corruption, hardware failure) whereas an archive is a long-term store of inactive or low-activity data retained for future use, whether for compliance purposes or historical data mining.

A simple way to view the difference is that backups are copies and archives are moves.

Archives must provide additional features, such as security controls and locking of data for compliance; search functionality, to query the archive; and options to expire and remove data, based on policy or time controls.

Tape media is well suited to archive, as it provides the following benefits:

Cloud archiving offerings provide an additional layer above the pure technology of the storage medium. They abstract the underlying storage platform by delivering archive as a service, with the implementation of that service the responsibility of a service provider.

Customers should expect cloud archiving to be competitive on cost compared to using tape and in-house processes and to provide value-add functionality, such as:

In-house tape vs cloud archiving

In-house tape and cloud archive have benefits and disadvantages. We’ve already touched on some of them, for example media refresh. This task is a major headache for large organisations with significant existing tape infrastructure, as media needs replacement on a regular basis. Other points to consider with in-house tape archiving include:

Points to consider for cloud archiving include:

Cloud archiving providers

Amazon Web Services – AWS is probably the most well known cloud computing provider. It has recently entered the market with Glacier, its long-term archive offering. Costs start at $0.01/GB per month with additional charges for bandwidth and data retrieval for more than 5% of the archive. Data can be ingested using portable media where data quantities prohibit the use of network transmission.

Arkivum is a UK-based company that provides a virtual or physical appliance as a gateway to its archive service. Data is archived and retained on tape using the LTFS format, which provides for data portability, should a customer choose to move its data to another supplier.

Autonomy, now part of HP, offers a number of archiving solutions, including its Consolidated Archive product. Data ingest rate can be as high as 3 million files per hour. HP also offers access to its new cloud object store through partners including TwinStrata and Panzura, with a raw data storage cost of $0.09/GB per month. This cost can be reduced with data deduplication and compression offered by the partner solutions.

Symantec provides email archiving using its Enterprise Vault cloud offering. This is an extension of its existing Enterprise Vault technology but does not require any onsite hardware or software to implement. Symantec uses a scaleable grid architecture to provide advanced searching (including within content) that can return results in seconds.

Summary: Will cloud archiving replace tape?

It is likely that most cloud archive providers are already using tape to deliver their services today. But, what these services add is a framework in which data can be stored and retrieved with all the additional features of security and compliance.

So cloud archiving will not replace tape. Instead, for many organisations the shift will be to use cloud archiving services and take advantage of the service wrapper, even though their data continues to be stored on tape media.

12 Feb 2013

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