MAGNETIC TAPES LIVE ON

About 30 years ago, backing up of company data was a leisurely pursuit. The business was closed for the weekend, the backup was effected at a specific time, and maybe copies of the backup would be made for external storage.

That wasn’t great if the weekly backup was scheduled for Saturday and the system crashed the day before. Storage snapshots then replaced tape, though they still had to be moved off the primary disk. Then came disk-based duplication appliances before Continuous Data Protection (CDP) became in vogue in the 1990s.

According to Andrew Tobin in Stryve, contemporary solutions place equal emphasis on disaster recovery and backups, with a cloudfirst approach to provide the optimal level of protection and continuity. “The Recovery Point Objective (RPO) generated by traditional backups is unacceptable in the modern world,” says Tobin. “Today’s ‘always-on’ companies simply cannot afford to lose an entire day’s worth of data in the event of a disaster.”

With CDP, a full initial backup is run and then subsequent backups simply record changes that have occurred to the data set since the last backup took place. “By utilising continuous data replication we can deliver RPOs of seconds by replicating every change that is generated in real time. CDP ensures that no data is lost,” says Tobin.

Though data backup started out in 1952 with IBM’s first tape drive (capacity 2.3MB), in the digital world magnetic tape still has a role to play. A modern tape cartridge can hold up to 15 terabytes (15,000GB) and tape storage is far more energy efficient than a server hard drive. It’s also about six times cheaper and more durable and resilient, and in fact Microsoft’s Azure Archive Storage uses IBM tape storage equipment.