Benfits of Tape Across IT Workloads

Tape is used in many different industries to address broad and diverse needs, such as compliance regulations, data retention policies, growth of unstructured content, and cybersecurity. The need for long-term retention of data will continue to expand. In many cases, management of data value is complex, as the future value of an asset may not be well understood. Tape’s low total cost of ownership, operational longevity and resilience helps organizations to address these and other concerns.

In most, if not all, cases, the value of tape is its relative low energy consumption and low total cost of ownership, especially compared to disk, for archive storage. There are other significant advantages to using tape, such as airgap to prevent data loss in a ransomware attack, ease of transporting cartridges, high volumetric density, and proven roadmap. These advantages are common across a number of different IT workloads.

 

Archive

In simple terms, a typical active archive solution can integrate different storage technologies (flash, disk, tape), locations (on-prem, co-lo, public cloud) and architectures (block storage, file systems, object storage), so that data is stored in the most appropriate storage-class based on considerations such as ease of access, security, cost and scalability.

The key characteristic of “active” in active archiving is that the archived data is managed by an intelligent software layer that indexes and co-ordinates the placement of data across the different tiers. Crucially, the storage in use should be transparent to the application or user. There should be no need to update the application when data is migrated from a faster storage tier to a lower cost, slower tier, or from an older technology to its replacement. The primary benefit of incorporating an active archive is that organizations can use their primary storage, secondary storage and tape resources more efficiently and reduce the costs associated with long term data storage in an era of minimal data deletion.

 

Object Storage Active Archives and Tape

For longer term retention, object storage has emerged as a key component of active archive deployments and is worthy of additional consideration. Object storage has traditionally been associated with the cloud because virtually every large cloud vendor today uses object storage (the most common format is Amazon’s Simple Storage Service or S3) as the underlying architecture for their infrastructure. However, the unstoppable growth of object data has changed assumptions about the storage technologies used to manage it, wherever it resides.

But although some businesses may still attempt to place all their object archive data on SATA disk-based devices, for the majority, data growth rates are exceeding the ability of traditional HDD technology (and physical rack space within data centers) to keep pace. And all- disk infrastructure is still many times more costly than a mixture of tape and disk.

Faced with these pressures, an increasing number of organizations are attracted to the value proposition of tape technology for object storage. The LTO tape roadmap, for example, projects individual cartridge capacities of 1.4 PB per unit by LTO-14, which more or less matches data growth rate predictions for the coming decade. This gives organizations that use tape for object storage a significant cost of ownership advantage over disk and flash alternatives both in terms of the potential for massive storage density combined with ultra-low cost/GB.

Today, there are multiple different ‘front end’ enabling technologies that can utilize tape solutions to store data in native object format, (typically S3 Glacier class). This simplifies replicating and tiering data from disk-based object storage to tape.

 

Data Backup and Recovery

Data protection solutions can be defined as products and services designed to restore content that has been corrupted or lost. This includes both business continuity processes – for example day-to-day restores of lost or damaged files which have minimal or no effect on the wider organization – and disaster recovery, which includes urgent and / or massive restores of mission critical databases, storage arrays or even entire data centers, where the organization’s survival is at stake.

 

Tape and Primary Storage

Tape can play an essential supporting role in both day- to-day and mission critical backup processes. Deploying tape allows organizations to offload data from primary storage to free up space for more valuable information and make most efficient use of their storage resources.

 

Tape and Secondary Storage

For data restores from snapshots – e.g. point in time representations of data – it is more common to use a ‘secondary’ storage array, which could be SSD or HDD-based. These arrays and appliances still provide relatively rapid restores of files but without the maximal performance of primary storage. Again, tape can play a supporting role here in offloading older snapshot data from capacity-constrained SSD or HDD arrays onto a less expensive, high capacity storage medium to extend RPO thresholds.

 

Tape and Cloud-based Data Protection and Backup

For clusters of small files or folders, and for relatively low volumes of data, cloud-based backup can be a more straighforward and practical solution because of its relative ease of recovery. Yet some drawbacks exist when storing large amounts of data in the cloud: the cost of the storage as datasets grow over time; the cost of retrieval, which is normally charged per gigabyte; and the time it takes to move very large datasets across the internet which can so severely impact recovery time objectives as to render the exercise impractical.

 

Disaster Recovery

Tape plays a role in DR solutions due to its portability, low cost, high reliability, high density, and offline characteristics. To support RPOs, snapshot technology can be used, and those snapshots can be copied to tape and protected offsite. Tape is particularly useful as an extension to secondary storage systems because it permits a much deeper backup history to be preserved as space on the physical array is filled with newer snapshot information. Of course, snapshots are not in themselves infallible, and they rely on the underlying storage system to be available. If the storage system is damaged or destroyed, snapshots might become unavailable or unusable.

A better approach, therefore, is to maintain periodic full backups on tape and keep copies both nearline in a tape library, for rapid accessibility, and offline and offsite in the event of total device or data center compromise.

 

Ransomware and Cyberthreats

In the ever-evolving landscape of cybersecurity, ransomware attacks have emerged as one of the most pervasive and damaging threats. A recent study found that in 93% of ransomware incidents, the threat actors target connected backup repositories, resulting in 75% of victims losing at least some of their backups during the attack, and more than one-third (39%) of backup repositories being completely lost. In late 2023, a notable and highly publicized ransomware attack on a European cloud provider saw the attackers successfully encrypt all production servers, as well as everything on the primary and secondary backup systems. Most customers lost 100% of their data as a consequence.

The very connectedness that is the strength of disk or cloud-based backup solutions makes them vulnerable in others. What makes tape a key weapon in the fight against ransomware is that it’s the only truly offline storage solution that can place Enterprise data behind a physical, disconnected, air gap barrier. It is the final part of the 3-2-1-1 rule which proposes users should maintain three copies of their data, on at least two different media types, with one stored offsite and one stored offline.

 

Bulk Transfer

Tape has always been a removable and portable storage medium, and has often been used to transport data, typically for storing data offsite for added protection. Tape strong encryption of media protects critical data from loss and malicious intent. Multiple PBs of data can be transported with minimal cost and at speeds unmatched by data center connections.

 

Big Data / Analytics

Tape is often overlooked as a storage medium for Big Data analytics because applications and workflows that process and generate enormous data sets are often associated with high performance computing and storage. These applications typically involve complex mathematical calculations, machine learning, and deep learning tasks, which require from parallel processing, low latency, and real-time analytical capabilities.

But tape can support Big Data workflows, particularly in capacity-intensive processes that are focused on handling and managing large volumes of data. These processes are prevalent in batch processing, data warehousing, and long-term storage scenarios. They are characterized by sequential I/O, low sensitivity towards latency and throughput, and the processing of large, contiguous file sets. Further, results of analytics and processing can be staged to tape for long-term storage and retrieval, to avoid having to rerun processing tasks again, or to extend the data within the overall data set.

 

Data Regulation and Compliance

An important part of any data protection and management strategy is ensuring that business information is stored and managed in keeping with regulatory and compliance legislation. Data privacy and compliance regulations vary from country to country, but many share common principles and requirements, especially in the era of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union. The penalties for breaching these requirements can be extremely severe and apply both to individuals as well as organizations.

Similarly, a host of industries have strict obligations for maintaining robust data security measures to protect sensitive financial data from unauthorized access, manipulation, or deletion. Examples include: Sarbanes- Oxley Act, Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), the Basel III international regulatory framework, and finally the Securities and Exchange Commission Rule 17a-4.

 

Tape Encryption and WORM Immutability

Tape technology strongly assists data governance and compliance objectives. It offers enhanced security because information can easily be encrypted as it is being written to the tape, typically using native hardware-based encryption within the tape device itself. This means there is no need to invest in extra software or separate hardware to get the strongest protection for data. For even greater security, modern tape formats support data immutability via Write Once Read Many (WORM) recording media technology that can store data in a non-rewritable format.

 

Contact your BackupWorks Account Rep today and ask about LTO Tape for your Backup and Archive Environment