Tape Elimination with Veritas Access

A significant number of my NetBackup customers are currently looking to eliminate tape within their environments. For a long time people have been saying that tape is dead but until recently I never believed it because of the amount of data you could store on an LTO tape and the performance of the drives, made it cheaper than an average disk array. With the introduction of deduplication technology, tape elimination started to become a reality but the cost to keep the data beyond a few months on deduplication pools was not cost effective and meant that tape still had a place within the environment for long-term retention.

With Veritas Access this is about to change as customers are now able to send their long term backups via S3 to a cost effective scale-out NAS solution. This effectively creates a two-tiered storage platform for the backup environment, with primary backups sent to high performance storage while leveraging advanced features such as client-side deduplication and Accelerator synthetic backups to reduce backup windows. Any backups that need to be kept for long-term retention would be automatically duplicated to Veritas Access via S3. This approach reduces the amount of primary storage required, eliminates tape, including all the operational costs associated with it and if using NetBackup Appliances or custom built Media Server Deduplication Pools (MSDP), provides a single vendor backup solution.

With this new approach to backups, tape elimination may become a reality after all.