How to Get Off of Tape by Jay Livens

I have been on numerous customer visits over the past year and one common statement I hear is I am looking at ways to reduce tape usage. I have blogged on numerous occasions in the past about the cost, reliability and performance benefits of tape and so my position on this is clear. While I believe (as do most industry pundits) that tape will continue to play a critical role in the data center, clearly some customers are looking to move off of it. It is in the spirit of that sentiment that I recently wrote a whitepaper on this topic.

To be clear, the whitepaper is not a thinly-veiled propaganda piece which really says that you shouldn't get off of tape. In fact, we went in to great pains to discuss the different technologies that you could use to migrate off of tape and the pros and cons of each solution. The reality is that for many customers, migration is difficult due to cost, process and technology considerations. The key in any significant transition is carefully reviewing the options and processes. To simplify the whitepaper, it summarizes the four steps required to move off of tape and each is discussed in more detail below.

Step 1: Assessment

The key to migrating to a new technology is assessing your options. You need to consider numerous metrics including ease of use, cost and retention. In the paper, we cover numerous considerations including:

Backup windows

Growth expectations

Disaster recovery

Retention

Application specific needs

Budget

A comprehensive assessments stage will help you better understand your business requirements.

Step 2: Evaluation

Once you have clarified your needs, you can then move to the evaluation stage. In this section of the paper, I discuss the different technologies that could be used to meet protection requirements. The goal was to broadly cover a range of options to help start the conversation. Solutions covered include a range of technologies including deduplication, continuous data protection, copy data management, replication, snapshots and many more. Each of these brings unique benefits when it comes to Recovery Time Objectives, Recovery Point Objectives and budget. As the prospective buyer, you must look at the technology in the context of your business requirements that you identified in the Assessment phase.

Additionally, this is the stage where you should pilot specific solutions. The paper also advises on key elements to test when evaluating these technologies to ensure that you understand the strengths and weaknesses of any chosen one.

After you have completed the evaluation stage you will emerge with a defined list of technologies that you will implement in your next generation architecture.

Step 3: Implementation

In this stage, the process of migrating to new technology begins and ends. Changing technologies can be challenging and users to need to think very carefully about the timing and process. Specific considerations highlighted include:

Prioritize migration process

Budget enough time

Create a repeatable process

Decide what to do with retained information

The key is that you must be thoughtful about migration. Remember that you will be using the new architecture for many years and so spending the time initially can make the difference between highly functional and efficient process and a complete disaster. At the same time, you must be sure that current SLAs are maintained as you update your infrastructure.

Step 4: Management

Once migration is complete, you have to consider ongoing management. That is, management of the new technologies and maintenance of whatever legacy information you maintain. The biggest challenge relates to companies with extended retention requirements because migrating historic information may not be cost effective or efficient. In fact for many companies, it is often optimal to leave existing tape assets in long-term storage and rely on either a third party (like Iron Mountain) or legacy infrastructures to gain access to the older data in the unlikely event a restore is required.

In summary, tape provides a powerful and beneficial medium for long-term data storage and archival. While I encourage people to think of data protection holistically to incorporate all technologies, there is no doubt that many end users are looking at ways to get off of tape. Our latest whitepaper provides a framework to manage the process of moving to new backup and recovery technologies. I hope that you find it useful and welcome any questions or comments.

LINK:	http://blogs.ironmountain.com/2014/service-lines/data-backup-and-recov...
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