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 Jerome M. Wendt explains why he feels this is the case.
Yesterday and today I am attending the BareMetal Data Conference in Nashville, TN, which is a small gathering by all accounts (50 attendees). But what I enjoy about this conference is that it is a gathering of a select group of records management providers that provide paper and tape storage along with online backup services to their clients. The invaluable insight that I glean from this conference is a reality check as to the current state of tape. This time it revealed something new: Tape is still doing just fine but for the first time I am detecting genuine concern among the attendees about tape's future.
The news of tape's death continues to be greatly exaggerated. I only say this because these are the individuals who would be the first to see a drop in tape usage and say something about it because it affects their bottom line. But exactly the opposite is true.
One individual told me that he since he has started his record storage business he has seen 29% year-over-year growth with this year being a bit of a down year where he has only experienced 28% growth in his storage business. Another individual with Tri-City Information Management only started his records management business seven years ago and has seen steady growth during that period of time.
Granted, many of the businesses that these providers service are in the small and midsize enterprise space so it is logical to assume their customers are not as up to speed on the latest advancements in deduplication and disk-based backup technology. Instead, their clients are continuing to proceed with tape-based backup which is how they perceive backup should be done.
That does not mean that there is palpable concern about the future of tape storage among these individuals. I brought out in my presentation at the conference that anyone can order a 2 TB SATA hard disk drive (HDD) for $199 (10 cents/GB) which compares very favorably with a 800 GB LTO-4 tape cartridge that sells for about $40 (5 cents/GB).
Afterwards, one individual came up to me and confirmed that he has seen a noticeable rise not in his online backup services but in the storage of HDDs at his facility. It indicated to him that more of his clients are abandoning tape for disk for this exact reason - the price differential between the raw capacity price of disk and tape is inconsequential.
Online backup is also making its presence felt among these providers. Granted, these attendees stand to gain regardless if their customers select online backup or tape from them but I definitely sense that paper and tape storage is still their gravy train. So in that respect, the most interesting insight into online backup's adoption and growth among small and midsize businesses came during a presentation from Geoffrey Nesnow, a Senior Manager with Iron Mountain who is responsible for its Market Strategy and Intelligence.
Here were some of the insights Iron Mountain has gained over the last year as it has looked more deeply into current adoption trends of disk and tape backup among the customers it serves and that he shared:
- Tape vaulting is big business but we are at an inflection point in the business.
- The role of tape among enterprise customers (over 5000 employees) has changed and they are rapidly moving from tape to disk. Further, they are insourcing this function and not looking to third party providers for the management of their backup of data on disk.
- In the mid-market (250 - 5000 employees), the switch to disk-based technologies is occurring. They are moving from tape vaulting to disk-based backup with a surprising number moving to online backup. Once they make the move, they are not continuing to do tape in any form.
- Those who are continuing to use tape use the term almost exclusively in the context of "archiving". So if they do store their tape in an offsite vault, they are looking for lower service levels and there are fewer concerns about retrieving the data.
- Disk-based backup is now hitting the mainstream in terms of market acceptability. Geoff openly speculated that EMC's acquistion of Data Domain was going to accelerate the adoption of disk-based backup and referred to it as a "gold mine of market acceptability".
- Technologies like deduplication coupled with solid state disk could result in the first real decrease in the amount of data that organizations have to protect.
- No hospitals of any size that Iron Mountain services are backing up images to tape in the traditional way. A major reason they are moving away fromtape is that the cost to migrate data from old generations of tape to new generations is "unbelievable" and the mechanisms for doing it are "horrible".
So after attending and presenting at the BareMetal Data Conference this week, it is safe to say that tape still has life. But for the first time I am sensing from those who are closest to the customers, who are daily talking to them and who stand to gain or lose from their buying habits possess a bit of the "deer in the headlights" look about them.
While I am not suggesting that tape is ever going to go completely away, it certainly appears that 2010 may well serve as the inflection point as a more aggressive transition from tape to disk. This will occur simply because disk prices are so low, backup processes are so broken and online backup software is so mature that all companies can justify making the switch to using disk in some capacity.
Author: Jerome M. Wendt is President and Lead Analyst at DCIG.
This article was first published by DCIG and is reproduced with permission.
•Date: 15th October 2009• Region: US/World •Type: Article •Topic: IT continuity
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