storage ICT


#dcsarticle: 21138 : http://dcsuk.info/n/nyxh


Time to think about tape? The reality for most organisations is that data growth over the next five to ten


years will be significant but unpredictable – a forecast which is challenging to say the least. Organisations know that in all likelihood they will have to budget for and provision fairly significant amounts of resource but quite how much is tough to point out, writes Steve Mackey.


B


ig datasets used to be the exclusive-domain of a few choice verticals - Financial Services, Oil & Gas, HPC, Life Sciences to name a few. These organisations, by the very nature of their industries are constantly creating information and making new discoveries which require cataloguing. A number of new dynamics have changed the game for organisations across the board - the explosion of the online world, new legislation around data retention, the move to digital content as well as the growing realisation that a company’s data may yield insights into all manner of trends amongst its customers. As well as these more recent requirements issues such as disaster recovery and business continuity remain priorities. Mid-size organisations across all verticals are therefore required to store an increasing amount of data and, equally importantly, store it for longer. However, while mid-market organisations are facing up to similar challenges to those facing larger enterprises - there are some stark differences in the resources they have at their disposal. Mid-market storage systems must take into account the fact that IT departments in these organisations are often small and under-resourced. Management and automation are therefore critical factors in selecting the right technology and architecture. One of the biggest decisions an organisation will have to make is choosing between disk, tape and a


32 www.dcsuk.info I February 2012


mixture of the two.


Despite ongoing concerns about disk as a long-term storage medium, there continues to be a lot of rhetoric within the industry - specifically from disk-only vendors - that disk is easier to manage than tape. This is despite significant evidence to the contrary1


. Much of this


evidence supports the argument that for mid-market organisations tape is less staff-intensive to manage. This in part is due to the leaps that have been made in tape automation technology. With automated tape libraries, backup jobs can be schedule to run automatically, significantly reducing the IT time required for firms using a stand-alone tape drive. Single tape drives must be manually loaded and unloaded to handle backups


Tape libraries specifically aimed at the mid-market now have simple to use graphical interfaces that provide simple access to all the automation features that might only have previously been expected in enterprise tape libraries. Features such as lifecycle automation, key management, media health monitoring etc. can all be easily configured through touchscreens or simple remote web browsers. More advanced mid-range libraries also provide the


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