Kicking the Backup Tape Habit

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Try as they might, organizations continue to have a difficult time breaking their long-term relationship with backup tapes. While many companies search for options, very few are close to replacing tape with another media, and most still continue to ship boxes of backup tapes every month to be stored away in a Mountain with few signs of slowing down. Gartner estimates that tape will continue to be a $2+ Billion industry for the next several years - and despite the fanfare about commercial cloud backup, adoption rates are still very low.

Companies continue to search for alternatives because there are clear financial and operational rewards to getting away from using tapes. In addition to the human resources required to manage the entire tape lifecycle, every aspect of the lifecycle itself - the tapes themselves, the apparatus required to create tapes (including upfront and ongoing operations costs), storage, recall, recovery, and return – requires separate investment. Operationally, tape backup is inefficient; data restoration requests are often urgent and driven by regulatory and compliance requirements that threaten large financial penalties for violation. Most organizations do not know what is on their tapes or where needed data may be stored. As such the tapes need to be recalled, potentially cataloged and configured. In fact, many companies no longer have the systems and software that created the tapes in the first place. This process can take days or weeks and cause significant compliance and delivery delays.

Despite the appeal of going tape-free, the current options and transformation required have proven daunting enough to scare even the most determined organization into indecision. For example, look at the most commonly discussed alternative to tape – commercial cloud backup. While many commercial cloud offers have addressed some of their earlier issues (e.g., data optimization, bandwidth reduction), other unresolved concerns like egress charges, recovery speeds, and data sovereignty still keep organizations from actively adopting cloud backup. The next logical alternative is lower-tier disk storage; technologies like Veritas Access (Access significantly reduces organizations’ per-TB storage costs and gives them the freedom to build a policy when they are ready to move backups to commercial cloud – click here to learn more) are a great alternative to tape backups, but organizations struggle to confidently answer the critical questions required to operationalize them, including:

• How do you adopt a new long-term retention strategy while preserving access to your historical data?
• How much of your historical data do you really need?
• Does your organization have the expertise and time to design and implement a new long-term retention platform on time and budget while effectively managing the risk of data loss or corruption (and if not, how do you get it done)?

No matter how compelling the alternative technology may be, if companies cannot be assured of implementing and operationalizing it with minimal (if any) risk, the status quo is more attractive than unsteady change.

For those brave enough to embark upon long term retention transformation projects, there are three common models:

• Like-for-Like – Move everything from a single platform to a new target.
• Multi-Media Consolidation – Consolidation of legacy media from multiple platforms to a single new one. Example – migrating legacy data from tapes and mainframe to a new disk-based target like Veritas Access to take advantage of lower per-TB storage rates and fast access to backups and archives.
• Intelligent Migration – Using analytics to understand existing stored data, determine the appropriate way to handle each component (is there Personally Identifiable Information being stored in a non-compliant way? Do you have Redundant, Obsolete, and Trivial data that should be defensibly deleted and not retained?) and migrate only what needs to be moved to a new target.

The Like-for-Like option is typically handled via a trained consultant using tools and process to move a single dataset from one place to another where all of the data must be kept intact. Veritas Services performs these kinds of migrations regularly for firms who are replacing their existing Archive solution with Veritas Enterprise Vault, and need to bring their Email Archive with them for compliance and discovery purposes.

Multi-Media Consolidation is one way to reduce multiple legacy media into a single target, driving simplification and taking advantage of newer storage media like disk or cloud. These migrations are led by skilled resources using specialized software tools to convert data into a new format and consolidate it from multiple sources to a single new media target. Organizations investigating the possibility of eliminating tape from their retention lifecycle often expect that the Multi-Media Consolidation approach is the only way to ensure that all of their tape data is preserved. This approach is an effective way to complete a large and/or diverse data migration, but it is rarely efficient. Considering that migration projects are typically scoped and priced by the amount of data being moved, moving everything often comes at a price that erodes any expected return achieved by retiring tape. Consequently, most of these migrations are never started.
 
Intelligent Migration has the same goals as the Multi-Media Consolidation method – migrating legacy data to a new target, eliminating the associated costs of tape, and restoring the operating efficiency to the corporation’s data protection strategy – but has several distinct benefits. Intelligent Migration:

• Protects the organization from regulatory & compliance violations by Identifying sensitive data being stored inappropriately.
• Reduces migration costs by:
o Determining what data has no value, does not need to be migrated and can be defensibly deleted (remember – migration projects are scoped and priced by the amount of data being moved)
o Measuring the level of redundancy in the remaining data to determine how much has to be migrated to preserve 100% of the data (hint: it’s almost never 100%)

Effectively migrating away from tape requires Intelligent Migration. Veritas’ Data Mobility Services deliver Intelligent Migrations via our unique combination of people, process, technology, and experience required to enable organizations to migrate away from tape while realizing the financial and operational benefits that justify the transformation.

For example, Veritas worked with a US-based financial services organization with more than 10,000 tapes and a lengthy retention policy due to regulatory compliance. The customer was motivated to move away from tape; their aging tape library was at risk of physical degradation, and the already large costs to store their tape increased yearly with every new tape they created. The customer had investigated migrating their tapes to cloud before but could never justify the costs of converting the entire tape library via a Multi-Media Consolidation-style project, particularly given that they did not truly understand the tapes’ contents or if the data was even worth saving. In addition, while their CIO’s strategic priorities included cloud adoption, the customer was unsure that cloud was truly the most cost-effective or operationally efficient storage target.
 

Veritas’ proposal was to engage our Data Mobility Services practice to design and complete an Intelligent Migration to Veritas Access. Our proposal delivered the following benefits to the customer:

• Access provided a lower price-per-Terabyte compared to the cloud, preserved near immediate access to Long Term backups, and positioned the customer to migrate to the cloud whenever it was ready for them.
• Veritas Data Mobility Services
   o Analyzed a statistically significant percentage of the customer’s tapes, showed them what was in their data, and created a plan to both address identified risk and defensibly delete redundant, obsolete, and trivial information.
   o Determine the level of redundancy of the customer’s data and thereby the number of tapes that would need to be migrated to protect the organization against loss (significantly less than 100% of the entire population)
   o Brought in the people and technology required to rehydrate and migrate the required tapes to Access as a turnkey effort where Veritas manages the risk and delivers the customer’s required outcome

The end result – the customer replaces tape with Veritas Access in their long-term retention strategy, resulting in ongoing financial savings and operating efficiencies, and is positioned to move to the cloud whenever it is ready for them.

Migrating away from tape is a worthwhile goal. Veritas is uniquely positioned to make it happen through the combination of the ideal destination for today’s market (Veritas Access, the most efficient disk-based target available), and a proven transformation process that will ensure that the journey is a smooth one that delivers the required results.