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The Importance of Tape Backup for Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity

December 4th, 2010 Leave a comment Go to comments

We operate in an increasingly data driven company environment where your business important data is the core of your business. It is estimated that 60% of companies that lose their data shut down within 6 months. We are all aware of the pifalls of inadequate disk backup the problem is what to do about it. What’s the most efficient way to backup and secure your data? A combination of tape backup and online backup might be the solution your business needs to create things operate.

Disk Backup Solutions
Although all of the exposure around tape backup and data duplication, tape remains the leading way that customers finally retailer their backups. Even if they initial back up to disk, most customers ultimately retailer their backup on tapes. Discover about recent changes in tape technology and how you can very best utilize disk backup.

Tape technology has evolved over the last 50 years into the high performance medium we use these days -but is has drawbacks. 1 of the issues with tape backup is that it is a mechanical device that needs human intervention. Mechanisms break and human beings can forget to change the tape or take copies off site. The tape is prone to wear and tear and the issues surrounding off site storage and retrieval aren’t to be underestimated. Online backup solves a great deal of the issues associated with tape backup but it isn’t without drawbacks. If you have big quantities of data to backup price could be an problem. Online backup software needs a particular quantity of IT expertise to install and maintain and in most instances online backup relies completely on a broadband Internet connection. Internet connections are dependable but they’re not 100%.

Data backup online might be costly for those who have big quantities of data to backup. Your reply might be to take advantage of online backup;but only for your important data. You should think about,very carefully, the data important areas of your business. To help you brainstorm some ideas I’ve listed below some areas you should take into account.

Depending on your kind of company and where you operate there might well be other important areas you should cover. Take the advice of both your business accountant and lawyer when drawing up your data backup strategy.

Whatever choice you make between online backup, tape, or a combination of both make certain you backup your important data. Don’t become 1 of the companies that every year shut their doors and fold simply because they failed to secure their most valuable asset – their data. Online backup or tape – make certain you test your backups. You should carry out regular retrievals to create certain your data is being backup up correctly. Don’t wait to have a disaster prior to you realize your backup data is corrupt and unrecoverable.

What role should play a tape backup storage in a backup system? To reply that, initial we have to talk about the streaming nature of tapes. Tape drives are generally designed to go very fast, and when they’re not run at that speed, they don’t perform as desired. For instance, an LTO-4 tape drive has a native transfer rate of 120 MBps. In the event you think about that most open-systems environments average 1.5:1 compression, which means that efficient throughput of an LTO-4, is 180 MBps, yet very few environments run their tape drives at this speed. Whenever you use a 180 MBps tape drive to write a 30 MBps stream, or even an 80 MBps, it spends a good deal of its time going back and forth (back-hitching, as it’s known as) to keep up with that slower data rate. If it back hitches a great deal, we call it shoe-shining, simply because the actions of the tape wheel imitate that of a individual shining his shoes.

Getting the proper tape library takes homework. An expandable, modular tape library supported by sophisticated management features and tied to modern backup software will support your enterprise for years to come. It is worth taking the time and effort to create the proper choice for your disk backup solutions.

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