What role should tape play in the cloud? The answer appears to be pretty straightforward. The key considerations for storage technology are business as usual; just because we’re in a cloud doesn’t mean we evaluate data storage technology strategies any differently. And just as usual, it depends on the nature of the data, the amount of data and the intended use of the data.

Clouds containing primary data (First Data Copy) such as application services or online email – As this data is likely to be the only copy of valuable information, it needs to be backed up. Tape is an excellent backup medium given its superior cost profile, and the latency profile of tape is very acceptable for secondary data. So, clouds that hold primary data will find great value in a tiered storage back-end including tape. Here is a great recent example where tape deployment was critical for very large cloud provider.

Clouds containing only secondary data (not primary copy) such as data backup or disaster recovery services – Many clouds or cloud services are there specifically to backup users’ primary data. Some of these services argue that they are only holding the backup, so there is no reason for them to create a copy of the copy. To further control costs, these cloud services often employ deduplication technology or incremental backup strategies. Nevertheless, data will continue to grow, and tape can be employed as part of a tiered storage strategy to substantially reduce the overall operating costs of the cloud service. Furthermore, restoring small files via a network works fine, but at some point, a dataset will be large enough that it is more efficient to physically transport the dataset via tape rather than via a network at online data rates.

Long-term data retention such as archiving services – In environments where long-term retention is needed, it is typical that the amount of data is extremely large, given that data continues to be added to the long-term data storage repository. The low cost, high reliability needs of long term data retention make tape a great fit for these environments, particularly when considering the performance needs of aging data.

So answering the question, “what is tape’s role in the cloud?” boils down to some familiar questions.

- Do you need to protect primary data in the cloud?
- Do you have long-term retention requirements?
- Can tape offer lower cost storage (and cost of ownership) and meet your SLAs?
- Does tape offer useful portability for large data sets for seeding, media/data distribution or data recovery?

Clouds by their very nature consolidate many users, and therefore their storage and processing burdens when fully utilitized are substantial. Because of this potential for large amounts of data, tape can hold significant cost benefits for many environments (here’s a good article on some of the benefits of tape). And if you would like help answering any of the questions above, give us a call to discuss how tape storage can play a role in your cloud backup solution.