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As one of Symantec's competitors points out in a webinar entitled "The future of backup", one of the key issues with tape is that it has not kept up capacity wise. From memory, so don't quote me, the ratio "How many disks you can backup to a single tape?" has gone from hundreds of disks per tape to 0.75 disks per tape.
Price per GB of LTO-4 tape here in the UK does compare well with 1TB disk drives (£13 vs £31) but the price of the media is only part of the equation. Hot swappable SATA disk caddy is pennies compared to an 8 slot robotic tape library and of course, reliability is key to that nice warm feeling with backups. Which I'm afraid tape has never given me. Our Quantum SuperLoader 3A has been replaced three times in as many years.
People's requirement for backups have changed as well. We have three main requirements:
- Disaster recovery: building burns down. Best choice here is replication to another site and tape scores VERY badly
- Restoring deleted, corrupted, accidently modified file by users: tape doesn't score very well here either as you probably have to retrieve the tape from off-site. B2D and de-duplication to cheap storage is a much better solution. This is the restore task day to day that everyone will do at some point
- Long term archive: possibly the only place for tape these days but that said, a big SATA disk farm with de-duplication could probably satisfy this for many years. And honestly, do you think that tape you put away six years ago is still readable, you have the hardware to read it or the software?
If our tape drive blew up tomorrow (ignoring we're on maintenance), I wouldn't replace it.
Cheers, Rob.