LTO Tape - A Silver Lining to Any Cloud

We’ve seen some dramatic changes over the past decade in storage technology. The one constant? LTO tape. It’s been a core component of storage best practices, taking a significant role alongside many different applications, whether it’s a backup, archive, tiered or portable solution.

Today, the cloud provides convenience, scalability and – in many cases – security. But last month was a tough one for the cloud. The news was highlighted by major outages affecting several web service organizations.

For the most part, these weren’t permanent. Most users went back to work once the issues were fixed. But what happens if the problems turn out to be more than just an outage? What if your company’s digital assets or email over the past several months was lost or inaccessible? It can happen, but can be prevented by having a sound data protection strategy that includes tape.

Tape-based storage in the cloud is expected to grow rapidly in the next few years. Tape can be the strong, silent silver lining to the cloud – very much present and protecting data, and completely transparent to the end-user.

In some instances, these forms of corruption can affect multiple copies of data that may have been replicated from one storage system to another. That’s why a backup copy to tape – stored offline – is so crucial to best practices in storage. And that’s the case even more so with cloud – there’s a sense of security when you have duplicated copies of files on multiple servers, but if they’re all online they can all be affected. Multiple copies of bad data are just that – copies of bad data.

Tape-based storage in the cloud is expected to grow rapidly in the next few years. Tape can be the strong, silent silver lining to the cloud – very much present and protecting data, and completely transparent to the end-user.

So ask your cloud provider if they are storing a copy of your precious data on tape. You may want to have your own copy of critical data on LTO tape in any case for added protection and easy access to the data if needed.

Tape also provides an essential ‘exit strategy’ benefit for cloud storage customers: what if you want to shift to another cloud storage provider? How would you get your data, which could be a sizeable amount, beyond the capabilities of the available bandwidth, to another cloud provider? A best practice method is for your current provider to provide a tape backup of your files to be delivered to your new provider. And if that tape data was formatted using the Linear Tape File System, the ingest at the new location can be done quickly as only the index of each LTFS formatted tape would typically need to be read to create a database of tape content.