Disk is the inevitable choice for backup tech

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: Information backup and recovery remain one of the most common pain points for most organisations, with the data growing over 60% annually. Also, government regulations and other factors require constant restoring of archived data.

Disk seems to be the inevitable choice for backup technology, and rightfully so. Disk-based backup and recovery is gaining attention because of changes in both the business and the IT environment. Tape has been the trouble point for anyone having to restore data from backups. Not only does tape-based backups consume the bandwidth of the network, there have also been instances where tape and drive failures at critical junctures have caused significant losses to companies. As per industry sources, about 30% tape backup and restores fail on regular basis.

Disk challenges the dominance of tape because of its increased capacities, improved performance, high reliability, faster access and prices, which have hit an all time low. Not only this, tapes are susceptible to damage by heat, light, humidity, dust and magnetic fields. They need to be stored in climate-controlled locations only. Mission critical data must be backed up, preserved, and retrieved quickly and efficiently. Disk drives definitely have faster recovery times than tape drives—usually a difference of a few minutes against hours.

Disk-based backup has many advantages. The total cost of ownership for disk in many cases are lower than tapes. Also, compliance and regulatory issues often compel IT managers to maintain certain volumes of data (email, receipts, customer call records, invoices, etc) on disk in order to provide the quickest access.

Disks have some clear advantages over tape. Tape drives based on the linear tape-open (LTO) 2 format transfer sequential data at approximately 25MB/s in real-world environments. In comparison, a high -performance disk library may move as much as 400MB/s, allowing a single disk library to offer the sequential performance of nearly 16 high-performance tape drives.

Disk libraries deliver incremental data restores in one-tenth the time of a tape library because there is no need to load tape cartridges and rewind tape in order to find the required data. Because disk libraries are built around storage controller technology, they can be fully redundant and use RAID protection against media failure. Intelligent disk libraries allocate capacity as needed, allowing near-100% utilisation of backup media. In addition, many disk libraries support data compression, which further increases utilisation.

Disk-based backups are more cost-effective. Some disk libraries can emulate multiple tape libraries simultaneously. Enterprises with several smaller backup applications and tape solutions can write their backup data to a single disk library that appears identical to each of their tape libraries dedicated to individual backup applications.

Disk-based solutions can back up data more than three times as fast as a tape. Additionally, disks eliminate the need for constant tape replacement and changes. Fierce competition and technological improve-ments have driven the price of hard drives down to the point where a very large hard drive has a pretty low cost. On average, a typical large hard drive will cost one-third the price per gigabyte of comparable tape media in terms of TCO.

Some of the best disk-based backups solutions provide daily automatic integrity checks, which assures that whatever has been backed up, can be restored with 100% guarantee. The data can be replicated securely from one disk based system to another system reliably.

Moreover, disk libraries will always be seen as a viable alternative for those enterprises that require high availability. Disk-based backup is the way to go!