Webinar Questions Answered by Jay Livens

I appreciate everyone who attended the recent webinar entitled The Challenge of Long Term Backup Retention where industry analyst W. Curtis Preston and I discussed how customers can manage archive information. We had a large volume of sign-ups for the event and so there is no doubt that this is a major topic of interest. For those of you who missed it, a replay is available online. There were also some questions from the webinar and I thought that this would be a useful forum to review and answer them.

How much lag time is there between a user requesting Iron Mountain to restore information and when that information arrives?

This really depends on customer requirements. Iron Mountain offers a breadth of recovery options ranging from a couple of days to a few weeks depending on customer urgency and budgetary requirements. Each project can be handled separately and so customers are not locked into one SLA or price level.

Can rules be set for aging out and/or data purge in the Archive Tape Management system?

Yes, they can. The indexing system captures all customer backup catalogue information and offers the ability to incorporate retention periods. The system will indicate what tapes have expired and the user can choose how to handle the data. One convenient option is to leverage Iron Mountain's Secure Media Destruction service to securely dispose of the unwanted media.

Is there a balance point between enterprise-wide archiving vs. application-specific approaches?

This is a big question and is worthy of a potential blog post or even a whitepaper! In short, you need to look carefully at your business and application requirements to decide what tools best meet your needs. Naturally, part of the choice must revolve around balancing the requirement for the most advanced application integration which is typically handled by specialized products versus the simplicity of fewer solutions. The balance between these two options will vary by customer and environment.

Is there an LTO migration path that will impact my spending on backup tapes?

Yes, one of the great things about LTO is that it has an established roadmap including ever increasing density and performance. As densities increase, your economics will change since you will need fewer pieces of media and a smaller tape hardware footprint.

Tape archives vs archiving to disks in a private cloud pros and cons

I have written quite frequently about the benefits of tape and you can read more in these three blog posts (Four Reasons Tape Is More Reliable than Disk, Magnetic Tape to the Rescue - Six Benefits of LTO and Dispelling 4 Myths About Tape). In general, tape provides compelling $/GB economics, data reliability and backwards compatibility. The disadvantage of tape is that the time to reading the first byte of information can be slower than disk. Disks, in contrast, provide the fastest performance on random I/O and first bytes, but at a trade-off of cost, long-term reliability and life span. The end choice is yours, but most industry pundits will agree that one of the best uses for tape is long-term archival storage.

What is the usable life of data on LTO-5 or LTO-6?

Media life is affected by numerous factors with one of the biggest being the susceptibility to bit rot which I wrote about here. In short, LTO media specs state that the media will last up to 30 years.

What is your view of Archiving and BU/R changing over the next 5 or so years?

Data is growing rapidly and there is no doubt that companies need to look for new and more efficient ways to protect the growing data. However, for most customers, 80% of data is inactive meaning it is rarely viewed and edited. This 80% of information consumes valuable primary disk space and extends backup windows. Over the coming years, we will see customers looking to more aggressively manage this inactive information and implement a cost effective tiering strategy. At the same time, companies will explore new and different ways to backup their data such as using OS/application specific backup solutions or new technologies like continuous data protection.

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