As one of the top suppliers of end-to-end data protection solutions, Tandberg Data was the logical choice to approach for their take on archival technology and the suitability of tape as an archival medium. In case you missed it, FierceCIO:TechWatch is focusing on storage systems for April's interviews and has already spoken with Douglas Self of Synology and Lee Johns of HP StorageWorks.

I spoke over the phone with Tandberg Data's Vice President of Marketing Marije Gould. Gould is responsible for product management and product marketing, global marketing, and strategic alliances at Tandberg Data.  Ted Oade, a business unit manager for Storage Systems was also on the line to offer additional insight. Oade is a veteran in the IT industry and has earned several patents for data storage technology inventions. As usual, all questions were sent in advance; responses were edited slightly for clarity with some snippets removed for length. 

FCIO: What are some common misconceptions of tape that exist today?

Gould: I think one of them is that tape is slow and it is not fast enough for today's backup environments. If we look at tape, particularly the LTO technology, it has developed over the last 10 years, and has become a really fast medium. It is great for writing data at high speeds--140MB per sec, without compression. Compared to a single HDD, it is actually faster.

The other misconception is that tape is going to be dead. I've been working in data storage for more than 10 years and during this time, people have been saying that it will be dead. The opposite is true and the use of midrange tape and the amount of data that is stored on tape is actually growing. Mid-range tape in particular is a reliable way for businesses to archive their data.

Oade: There is a misconception about reliability. If you look back 10 years ago, there were admittedly some issues with reliability when companies could not keep up with demand and were manufacturing tape drives at a breakneck pace. Since then, the tape market has benefited from all the competition. Tape has evolved to LTO, which is the leading tape technology today. LTO is incredibly reliable, today's mechanisms are very robust, and unlike disk, tape has heavy duty error correction built in.

I think the other issue is related to cost. There are serious advantages for tape, even ignoring the cost of raw capacity.  The cost of tape is much lower when you compare it with other total cost of ownership factors, taking into account the infrastructure you need for a disk drive array, such as: Power, cooling and storage infrastructure. Furthermore, tape is also much easier to manage thanks to the availability of management software designed for it.

FCIO: In an age of cheap HDD storage, does tape retain any advantages over the storage tier?

Gould: What we've seen over the past decade is that tape has established itself as the archival media. The cost of ownership and the cost per gigabyte has made it a very low-cost, long-term storage media. It also doesn't take any power when stored offline--your data is just there. Furthermore, it is also very good for disaster recovery, and being offline protects data from potential virus attacks.

FCIO: Can you tell me more about the RDX removable disk technology?

Gould: Tandberg introduced the RDX removable disk technology toward the end of 2006. When we initially introduced it, cartridge capacities reached up to 120GB, today we offer capacities ranging from 160GB to 1TB. The RDX cartridge is a 2.5-inch removable hard disk drive (HDD) protected against electromagnetic interference and shock. It is shock-proof and portable, and has an archive life of more than 10 years. This is combined with the "best of disk" in terms of higher access speeds, random access and gives the flexibility to upgrade to newer cartridges.

RDX technology has been adopted by the world's leading OEM's such as HP, Dell, IBM, Fujitsu, NEC and others. They offer RDX as a standard option with some of their server and workstation ranges. Over the past couple of years, more than 300,000 RDX docks and almost a million RDX cartridges were shipped worldwide. RDX overtook DAT in terms of drive shipments in Q4 2010, and many small businesses are also choosing RDX to replace older DAT drives.

FCIO: What advice would you give to an enterprise that wants to deploy a secure, robust backup system?

Gould: In general companies need to look at their business objectives and legal requirements. In many industries, their focus is on data retention, or when data has got to be destroyed. Businesses need to be very clear about their requirements. Tandberg Data recommends a mix of disk and tape to meet these requirements. 

Oade: You also need to know your potential vulnerability. What happens when you lose data, what are your disaster recovery processes and consequences of data loss?  If you have budget constraints, you start by protecting the most mission critical and valuable data, and then propagate outwards from there.  

FCIO: What are the biggest mistakes you've seen when companies deploy tape?

Gould: Besides the obvious such as keeping tape and drives at the right temperature and in the condition, how tape is stored is also very important. I've heard of customers using tape as door stops, or placed on window ledges; a lot of companies offer you to help you store your data safely off-site if you don't have the space to do it yourself.

Secondly, test your deployments. I've heard of stories in which customers had massive implementation of software and tape automation, and they've installed everything. It was only when they lost some data that they realized that nothing was backed up on the tapes. Test the tape backups to make sure that all the settings are configured correctly.

Oade: One of the biggest mistakes I've seen is that people don't automate because they feel that it'll cost them more. In reality, in terms of TCO, tape automation is not only very affordable in terms of acquisition; the fact is that when you automate, you remove the potential for manual mistakes. The data takes care of itself in terms of being protected.

You also need to understand that a system deployment process needs to take place, either from scratch or from an existing solution. One of the issues with tape is that it can take data very quickly. As such, it is important for administrators to be aware of bottlenecks in the systems feeding the data in. All tape drives use a buffer before actually writing to that physical tape. Many of the older technologies did not have adequate speed matching if at all and a slow data feed into the drive would cause a phenomenon called "shoe-shining"--the tape drive has to stop and start a lot, which can put destructive strain on the tape drive over the long term. Of course, newer LTO tape drives tend to have much more robust speed-matching. The drive can adapt to slower data rates and prevent shoe shining and as a result is more reliable.

Related Articles:
Q&A with Lee Johns of HP StorageWorks
Q&A with Douglas Self of Synology
Q&A with Ben Gibson of Aruba Networks
Q&A with John Merrill of Xirrus