Backup and Archive Planning for 2012
Some handy tips from LTO Ultrium News Bytes
Holiday cards? Check. Gift for the boss? Check. Holiday party tux rental?
Check. Dinner plans for New Year's Eve? Check. Backup and Archive planning for
2012? Um...
It's that time of year where everyone is finalizing their business plans for
2012. And for those who are still working on their data storage backup and
archive plans, the LTO Ultrium program has some reminders and Tips for small and
medium businesses, as well as large enterprises to keep in mind.
Consider the size of your data storage needs. Track the growth of your storage
size over the past year. You should take into consideration how fast your data
is growing. Both of these answers will help in determining your data storage
size needs.
Bonus Tip: LTO tape systems can easily scale. Simply add more
cartridges to increase capacity.
Know if your industry or business has any legal requirements for retaining
specific data, such as how the data needs to be stored and for how long.
Bonus Tip: LTO tape technology offers WORM (write once read
many) cartridges to help address compliance matters and tape drive encryption to
help keep data secure.
Keep in mind how much time your backup plan will require, what are the data
recall and retention requirements, and most importantly how much it will cost.
These things can have a significant impact on the efficiency of your backup and
archive systems.
Bonus Tip: Studies have shown tape systems to be up to 15
times less costly than disc systems for long term data retention.
Consider changing archive requirements. For large enterprises, one of the
biggest concerns is how to select the proper media choice for the business that
will also meet the storage requirements of legislation like Sarbanes-Oxley and
HIPAA. In this situation, it's best to think about how important the data is and
how frequently it needs to be backed up.
Bonus Tip: a combination of disc for fast access performance
and tape for data protection, long term archive, cost and energy control can be
an optimal strategy.
Despite the best planning, failures do happen. Tape storage offers the security
of offline and off-the-net storage that protects company data assets from the
threats that can attack online or on-the-net data (e.g. hacker, virus,
disgruntled employee, system error) including both archive and backup data sets.
It also lets users store large volumes of data at a low operating cost per byte,
making it ideal for long term archival storage of large files that don't need to
be accessed frequentlyMost likely, your storage needs
will continue to grow and with the LTO Program's extended product roadmap
through generation 8, LTO is addressing the growing demands of data protection
for both small and medium businesses as well as large enterprises and with the
new LTFS using tape just became easier.
LFTS Makes Tape Easy To Use
– With the Linear Tape File System and LTO-5 Ultrium tape drives, you can
drag and drop files to and from the LTO-5 Ultrium tape, in a manner like using
disk storage or a thumb drive-but at a cost as low as 3 cents per GB (estimated
cartridge costs uncompressed). Never before has managing and accessing backup,
archive and video content on tape been this simple.