Scott Lowe – Founder and Managing Consultant of the 1610 Group
Abstract:
Tape and cloud storage targets have their pros and cons. There are many differences between these two technologies, which we will explore in this paper.
These differences can steer the decision process you may have for getting virtual machine (VM) backups offsite with Veeam® Backup & Replication™.
Introduction
In recent years, disk-based backup and recovery solutions have become increasingly popular as organizations strive to meet demanding recovery objectives (RTOs and RPOs) while providing a solution to easily manage data protection needs. This has become a more complicated matter in recent years as today’s datacenter has seen an explosion in the amount of VMs in use,
increasing the data profile that needs to be protected. Tape systems are a tried-and-true practice for many environments, including large investments in tape infrastructure.
While cloud storage for many environments appears to be an alternative to tape systems, there is a significant learning curve associated with adopting object-based storage in public or private clouds. The overall goal is to provide the best RTOs and RPOs while reducing costs.
Tape is still viable today
It may not be obvious as one looks around the modern datacenter, but many of the technologies that people consider cutting edge have roots that may go back years or even decades. Virtualization isn’t exactly new (while VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V have made it popular). It’s quite an old practice from other systems throughout the history of technology.
Like virtualization, tape systems for backup storage have been in use for a very long time in the datacenter. That’s not to say there isn’t uniform support of tape systems for backup storage. In today’s datacenters, tape remains a soughtafter backup mechanism as well as a technology others are rushing to remove.
Pros
There are a number of clear benefits to leveraging tape systems for backup storage. These benefits help make the case to position tape as a desirable backup target. Let’s take a look at these scenarios.
