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Migrate your Tape Archives to Disk True online archives have become a reality. By Amplidata.
Tape as a medium for data storage has been declared dead a good number of times. Yet somehow the medium has managed to remain popular, especially for long-term data storage: tapes are inexpensive to buy, store and (in some cases) operate. While a lot of backup data is nowadays stored on disks, most data archives still primarily rely on tapes. Due to new business requirements and compliance regulations, this might now change as well. Many companies are now building online (accessible) disk-based data archives, either as a staging area before moving the data to offline (inaccessible) archives or just to replace their tape-based infrastructure.
Why can’t tapes be used for online archives? Primarily due
to the fact that tape-systems have some challenges that cannot be overcome.
The
latency and random access characteristics of tape, for example, come nowhere near to the performance of disk- based systems. Providing global access is virtually impossible. Tapes are not as reliable as most would like to believe: unused tapes need to be stored in very stable temperature and humidity conditions. The only way to make sure data is still accessible is by regularly reading the tapes to verify data integrity – but tapes that are used regularly experience a drastic decrease in MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) of the media. Backups greatly improve your reliability and availability. As tape is so cheap to buy, why not make one or two copies extra? That is a great idea, but the
problem is that the copy is made at the same time as the original. And the copy faces exactly the same challenges. You could make fresh backups every so many months, but that again impacts the MTBF. On top of that, the management of the tape archive becomes very complex! Studies have shown that simple decay in tape media over time can cause a large percentage of restores from tape to fail!
Disk-based data archives have been promoted for over a decade. The main arguments for disks are growing disk capacity and falling disk prices. Ironically, these characteristics have caused a new challenge: large disk densities highly impact the de facto standard of protection mechanism – RAID – of disk storage systems. Large disk sizes have increased rebuild times for failed disks to multiple days or weeks. Several vendors have created various solutions to solve this problem. Some of these include new RAID schemes, others are presented as a layer on top of RAID.
One solution that is particularly innovative is the Amplidata distributed storage solution. The technology aims at improving data accessibility and reliability compared to
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