Keeping it reel - why tape storage isn't going away

For a data backup technology that dates from the early 1950s, tape remains surprisingly popular - especially given the rapid rise of SSD and cloud alternatives. Peter Gothard unspools the reasons behind its stubborn refusal to die

Ker-click, ker-klunk, whirr. Chances are, if you’ve been in IT for the past couple of decades or more, you’ll be more than familiar with the concept of tapes to back up (or even stream) critical data.

But despite numerous advances in storage technology since tape’s heyday in the late 1990s, a surprisingly large number of organisations still use the technology as their primary storage medium.

Paul Le Messurier, programme and operations manager at data recovery firm Kroll Ontrack, believes the main reason for this is the technology’s proven reliability.

“Tape technology has been around for a long time and been regarded as reliable, though there’s always the risk of degradation if stored off-site,” Le Messurier says.

“I think there’s still the feeling that SSD [solid state disk technology] is still relatively new. It’s believed there may still be manufacturing problems with it.”

Another advantage with tape, says Le Messurier, is that data can be recovered in the event of the tape being damaged or corrupted, whereas when an SSD fails it tends to take all the data with it. “SSD can be quite difficult to recover in comparison,” he says.

When Computing has spoken to SSD vendors in the past, after the obligatory sales pitches about their own particular “best way” of physically creating solid state memory, comparisons between different “qualities” of flash are always made in terms of number of rewriting opportunities onto the memory. Cheaper materials lead to a more rapidly degrading oxide layer between the floating gate and substrate areas of the chip, and mean less read and write cycles can be carried out before the memory dies.

Tape is wonderfully more analogue in nature than this. You can dig out an old vinyl LP after years in storage and be fairly confident that it will work, whereas your hard drive with your MP3 collection on it could fail at any given moment. It seems that this SSD “sudden death syndrome” is still putting many people off this form of storage for critical data.

Cost and connectivity – or a lack of – are other factors behind tape’s continuing popularity, says Le Messurier.

“In some industries one of the key things may be to hold data off-site,” he says. “For example, we had a client coming to us recently and they wanted us to completely copy a whole set of tapes. I guessed that they’d been pressured to make a total copy in an audit.

“If you put some data to a hard drive or an SSD, it may be costly to do that, to buy it and then also take it to another location,” he says.

But more importantly, any storage medium that links to a network is inherently vulnerable.

“We’ve seen cases where disgruntled employees have deleted not just data but also backups of data, so anything linked up online could still be at risk of that happening. With tape, that’s not a problem,” says Le Messurier.

Jacky Constantine is finance and IT manager at Luton Community Housing (LCH), and has recently struck a deal to begin moving the organisation’s previously tape-based backup entirely to a more modern solution: the cloud. Over an indeterminate period in the near future, LCH will start by backing up to both tape and its cloud storage provider, eVault.

Keeping it reel - why tape storage isn't going away

For a data backup technology that dates from the early 1950s, tape remains surprisingly popular - especially given the rapid rise of SSD and cloud alternatives. Peter Gothard unspools the reasons behind its stubborn refusal to die

Before signing on the bottom line, Constantine asked EVault and LCH’s managed service provider Pacific Computers for assurances as regards her data’s location.

“We asked for information about where [the data] is and all that sort of thing… we asked all these questions at the start,” says Constantine.

She freely admits that part of the thinking behind the move was to hand responsibility for backup to an organisation far better equipped than LCH to manage it.

“The thing with us is we’re not IT professionals and we already outsource our computing,” she says. “The main point of all this was for business continuity and disaster recovery, so if we have any type of issue we won’t be the one handling it anyway. In the main, we will be providing guidance as to when we want things set up, how and by when. But in terms of retrieving that data and getting it onto a hosted server for us so we can carry on working, we wouldn’t know how to go about it, so yes we need to have an element of trust in them.”

Another factor was money: when the deal with EVault was struck in April 2012, the quoted price was around a fifth of what it would have cost only a year previously. “That’s why we were happy to go with it,” she says.

But is Constantine taking a reckless gamble by abandoning an economical and reliable form of backup and instead putting her trust in a cloud provider?

“As with most questions around cloud, it depends on the scenario,” says Le Messurier.

“There are clearly issues around security – not just backup, but around apps and storage, so security comes to mind. With cloud storage, you don’t know where it is or who’s got it, and how do you know the third party provider is going to be better than doing it yourself?”

Another issue is bandwidth.

“You’ve got your backup because you want to restore from it, but how quickly can you do that?” asks Le Messurier.

“It depends on the network bandwidth, and particularly yours on-site. It’s important to assess that.”

Le Messurier says that Kroll has customers who would rather restore data from a crashed drive “in a matter of days” than restore backed up data remotely across the cloud, taking “a few weeks”, due to poor network bandwidth at their end.

Constantine says tape backup will finally be ditched only when LCH is “confident that [cloud storage] is working as well as we envisaged; that everything we back up now is still being backed up, and the improved frequency and scheduling that we wanted has been factored in, and that Pacific don’t have any concerns either”.

Le Messurier is confident that tape storage has a long future ahead of it, with Kroll seeing growing demand for its service that transfers data from legacy systems to newer tape formats. “Clients come to us and want tape duplication from legacy tapes onto new tapes; we see a regular need,” he says.

Perhaps – forgive the pun – tape may find itself stuck in a loop for some time due to factors like this.

@PeterGothard