Its Time For Tape To Die

There are days when all I can see are blood covered daggers sticking out of oozing backup tapes, strewn about a field littered with corpses of Symantec’s heinous Backup Exec non-application. I often wonder if there can be a new class of software called Frustrationware or Failureware. SBE is a horrible blight on human kind, and I don’t care if Symantec reads this. In fact, I relish the idea that they read this piece and decide that they are going to abandon their lofty and impossible goal of making SBE work as simply unattainable and cast it into the sea, thanking me along the way with a $10,000,000.00 grant.

Of course, I have a vivid imagination and they likelihood of any of this ever happening is about 1 in that 10 million I mentioned. Yet the problem remains. Tape is a horror and I challenge any vendor who makes their living from tape to prove me wrong. I’ve got 122u worth of rack space in which to drop any manner of gear which says I’m wrong, at which time I will gladly state that I was, indeed, incorrect and will then cast myself into the same sea I had dreams of whilst envisioning Symantec’s brilliant turn away from SBE.

Reality speaks to the contrary, however. I will not be proven wrong. In fact, it will be proven that tape is a dead industry. There is no longer a solid market case for tape and tape is nothing but a burden and a false crutch which companies lean on. The only value that tape brings to the table is cost, and even that is now seriously being challenged. The reason, however, that I say tape is dead is manifold. First and foremost is that hard drive storage space has risen dramatically and cost has dropped precipitously.

Now, before you say that I’m a nut and that you cannot just backup to even a bunch of hard drives and be done with it. You’d say I was out of my JBODing mind. Let me clearly state that I agree with you here. You need a workable topology just like tape required in order to work, and you can’t just toss cheap storage at a problem and expect it to be fixed. Its far better to use a clearly established operational plan for data backup in your enterprise environment. This is a fact one can only escape at the peril of their own life.

You can use HOST to DISC to DISC to CLOUD, or you can do HOST to CLOUD, or you can use any combination of those. You can even keep your creepy tape libraries in play and run HOST to DISC to TAPE and sideplay the CLOUD aspect, then rotate TAPE out using Stone Mountain or the like. You can use any combination of the above or what have you. There are companies like Datto and eFolder who sell into the MSP and VAR spaces, so if you are a business owner or officer in IT you might to ask your providers about these services.

In the very near future, disc itself will take over for tape and will become all that more reliable. Why? Because that disc will be a solid state drive capable of holding one to five terabytes of data and are about as durable as tape, if not more so. Before you scoff, how long did it take for us to jump from 80GB drives to 2TB drives? How big are the SSDs we’re seeing now? 500GBs? They’re costly now, but RAM is cheap, and SSD memory isn’t all that different. We’ll be seeing costs drop in the next few years, and then HP and Dell will be making “tape” libraries with SSDs instead of actual magnetic tape.

Just wait and see.