For Lehman Brothers that occupied three floors in the WTC 1 tower, the deliberate crashing of the hijacked American Airlines Flight 11 Boeing 767-223ER was severely debilitating. The WTC complex housed not only the corporate headquarters of the erstwhile renowned investment banker but also its technology center. As the twin towers collapsed under the impact, Lehman was in a severe throe of crisis as all its systems and accounts went down. Chaos reigned supreme.

Fortunately, the bank had an offsite backup policy in place and within 48 hours of the attack, it was able to start trading operations from a new facility set up across the Hudson River in New Jersey. While many other enterprises that had their offices in WTC were severely impacted and some of them could never be on their feet again, a few of them managed to scrape through and survived.

With 9/11, the world woke up to the threat of global terror but also to the need for disaster recovery and offsite archival strategy. The attack also played a role into an unintended consequence; the tape as a medium of storage was saved from the very verge of extinction.

In the years leading to 9/11, most of the IT analysts and media had predicted the gradual decline and the subsequent demise of tapes as a backup medium in the enterprise. With storage capacity of the HDD increasing manifold as prices fell southwards, the tape had literally been made redundant. The unwieldy magnetic medium was dubbed as a relic of the past and it was in the past where it really belonged; that was the vox populi.

And suddenly, many companies woke up to a realisation that the storage media invented in the 1950s still had a role to play and quite unlike the gloomy predictions, it was neither dead nor going to die in the near future.

Saved by archive

In was in 1951, when the magnetic tape was first used to record computer data on the Eckert-Mauchly UNIVAC I. Then, the bulky Uniservo drive recording medium was a thin metal strip of rolled up tape with a capacity of a few MB data at best. Contrasting it with today, where the storage tubs have crossed the TB limit and is racing towards PB scales, the tape seems arcane.

So what are the options in front of the IT manager, who not only has to ensure that the data is safe and protected but also efficiently managed? The logical thing would be to invest in the future, shift to optical media or the cloud for that matter. However the choice is not as easy as it seems, the biggest issue is that many enterprises have spent years perfecting that tried and tested method of data protection using a tape and have invested substantial sums in people, training, and money along the way.

Thus, while the disk-based data protection might be making steady inroads in the area of backup solutions, tape still has a role to play, especially in larger organisations. Tape is simply being moved downstream to the archival tier rather than the backup tier of the storage infrastructure.

So even if many IT managers find tape to be cumbersome and bulky, they cannot find any other medium that can replace the portability and the cost associated with it.

Basant Chaturvedi, Head IT, Perfetti Van Melle India, confirms this when he says, “Tape has always been easily transportable. Tape cartridges can be shipped offsite in boxes, transported by truck or hand carried to remote locations for secure offsite storage. If a disaster occurs in the data centre, the offsite tapes can be retrieved to restore applications.  Tape is the lowest cost medium of all media. It can be taken offsite to allow for disaster recovery in case the primary site is lost due to fire, earthquake, flood or theft. Tape is proven to have a shelf life of 30 years when stored in proper conditions.”

Compliance requirement is the other significant aspect that tapeaddresses, as Patrick Gavisk, IT Manager, WATPS, LLC, states. “Our office is required to store HIPAA data for very long periods of time, and we feel pretty confident about the durability of tape under proper storage conditions. We have considered doing some interim backups to disk, but the final storage would be tape,” he says.

The Cost Factor

Besides the archival and the compliance requirements, the single biggest factor that works in tape’s favour is the cost. Even with the continuous decline in disk prices, tapes are still the most cost effective medium for storing vast amount of data. Price-wise, tapes tend to be less expensive in the long run than disks. So if data needs to be stored for say 10+ years the total cost of ownership for tape will be less compared to the disk.

Balasubramanian M, Deputy General Manager, Saipem India, agrees, “Tape is still a viable medium for storage since it can store large amounts of data cost effectively as the archive data can be on it. Random access storage like DVD is too small in capacity and hard disks are expensive to buy and maintain. We are using tape in our enterprise. We have a tape library and the systems to back up data and restore from tape.”

In a white paper from the Linear Tape-Open (LTO) Program, David Reine and Mike Kahn of The Clipper Group looked at total costs of ownership over a five-year period for the long-term storage of data in tiered disk-to-disk-to-tape versus disk-to-disk solutions. Factoring in acquisition costs of equipment and media, as well as electricity and data centre floor space costs, The Clipper Group found that the total cost of Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (SATA) disk solutions was about 23 times more than tape solutions for archiving.

One of the chief reasons that the tapes are also cost effective is that there is little or no maintenance involved with tape storage, thus there is no continuous overhead cost for the tape. Disk drives consume electricity to power and cool them, regardless of whether the devices are being accessed. Tape drives, on the other hand, use little power when not reading or writing tape cartridges and tape cartridges stored in an automated library use no power at all. Hence, tape works out to be much cheaper than disk.

Pitfalls and challenges

Nonetheless, for all the virtues of tape as a medium, there are still a lot of vices. Ask IT managers who have grappled with magnetic media in the past and they will tell you the story. The most common complaint is that tapes are slow and unmanageable. There is a lot of manual intervention required with tape and not everyone can understand and operate the tape libraries.

SK Rudra, Manager (Group IT), Usha Martin Group, elaborates, “Data backup on tape is time consuming. And since tape backups store and retrieve data sequentially, one needs to go through the entire length of tape even to retrieve the last backed up file, which is again time consuming. Not to mention the fact that tapes are also quite vulnerable to thefts and damage.”

Nandu Bhatt, GM (IT), Wilson Sandhu Logistics, echoes similar views, “The biggest challenge with tape is file restoration. Tapes can be immensely slow when it comes to data restoration, also due to the fact that there are not many software tools available that can help in the process.”

Besides, tapes are also prone to magnetic data erasure, and special storage space is required to store tapes for longer durations. There have also been instances of how a certain IT manager was caught in a bad mess when he accidentally erased a tape.

To counter these issues, Chaturvedi advises a structured solution that needs to be well thought out. “If you are planning for old data archiving, storing image and video files, which don’t need frequent access, tapes are the right media. Thus, decide upon whether you need among DATs, DLTs and LTOs based on the organisational backup requirement. This determines one-time cost of the tape device and recurring cost of tapes, which one needs to use for application backup. If the backup size is more than 2 TB, you may need to think over usage of various tape libraries, which is a more viable solution. Interestingly, this doesn’t need manual intervention,” he states.

Bleak future?

While the tape is very much alive and kicking now, what does the future portend? Will it continue to exist in the days to come, or will newer technologies and inventions like Blue Ray and Holographic storage finally make it redundant?

The answer is yes and no. While newer technologies have made other storage media far easier and manageable, the tape is evolving as well. The biggest indication of this is in the form of the LTO Consortium that has members like IBM, HP and Seagate, which directs development and manages licensing and certification of media and mechanism manufacturers. The standard form factor of LTO technology goes by the name Ultrium, and the most recent version was released in 2010 and can hold 1.5 TB in a single cartridge. According to many reports, LTO has been the best selling “super tape” format and is widely used with small and large computer systems alike, especially for backup.

There is also much action on the software side, with players like NetApp and Symantec working on newer technologies like data deduplication on tape and virtual tape libraries that can be managed quite effortlessly.

Arun Gupta, Group CIO, Raheja Group, puts it succinctly, “Tape and NAS/SAN are not comparable as different media types offer different capabilities and thus are used for different purposes. In the hierarchical storage definition, tape is at the base level, while fast disks could be at the top. So based on need, each plays an important role and offers differing RoI.”

The tape is very much going to exist in the enterprise as long as the need for long-term storage or archival remains. Just as the adage goes, never put all your eggs in one basket, similarly never bet all your data storage on one format. Tapes will always find a humidity-free space beyond the NAS and SAN boxes.