What You Don t Know About Tape (Or Were Afraid to Ask) by Pete Lorenco

In my conversations with small-business owners, I've found that many are likely to shun products and services they see as geared to the budgets and large-scale demands of Fortune 500 data centers -information management solutions among them.

That's unfortunate. By doing so, they're missing out on the opportunity to leverage some great technology advances that can be scaled to the needs of their growing firms. Case in point: data backup and recovery with tape.

In March 2013, Iron Mountain surveyed more than 400 small and mid-size-business IT pros to size up their opinions about this reliable, enduring medium. Quite frankly, I was blown away by the participants' misconceptions:

Here's a sampling:

Almost three-quarters of the respondents who don't use tape backup said the medium is an outdated technology.

More than half think, it can't recover data quickly enough.

One out of four said, it doesn't allow granular recovery.

It looks like we have some serious educating to do! Let's go point by point.

Myth #1: Tape is an outdated technology.

Citing tape's 60-year career as a negative might not ring well with Queen Elizabeth, nor is it logical, given the facts. With the advent of LTO-5 and now LTO-6 technologies, tape continues to improve in terms of longevity, automation, capacity and security. And with the emergence of LTFS (Linear Tape File System), which endows tape with some disk-like search abilities, you can create easy-to-access virtual drives.

Myth #2: Tape can't recover data quickly enough.

On the contrary. LTO-6 has a 400MB/second maximum speed. Even older LTO-5 technology, introduced in 2010, can move data at 140MB/second. And if you use 2:1 compression, it doubles to 280MB/second.

Myth #3: Tape doesn't allow granular recovery.

Sure it does. You just have to know your options. The vast majority of IT pros who use tape do so as part of a hybrid storage that includes other storage methods, such as a storage-area network or network-attached storage. Tape fits right in. A quarter of respondents currently using tape backup are also currently using or planning to use cloud-based or online backup services.

Want to learn even more, including the bottom-line facts about tape's cost effectiveness? Read Tape's Vital Role in Small Business Backup and get up to speed before the competition passes you by.

LINK:	http://blogs.ironmountain.com/2013/service-lines/small-business/what-y...
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