To some IT managers, the debate is not about if, but when, hard disks will overtake tape as the primary backup tool. Others maintain that mature, reliable tape technology still has a place in the enterprise, though even its staunchest supporters, including Storage Technology Corp., are making moves to blend disks into their tape-centric offerings.
"For the first time, it is the protection of information that has become important," said Mike Ruettgers, CEO of storage giant EMC Corp., in Hopkinton, Mass.
Time and again, Ruettgers has predicted the demise of tape, saying it is no longer a viable backup and recovery solution. He points out that recovering one petabyte, or 2 to the 50th power, of data from tape would take a year and a half, while such a recovery operation from disk would be nearly instantaneous.
For IT managers, many of whom once viewed storage as an ancillary issue, the debate is hardly academic. According to industry figures, storage at Global 2000 companies doubles annually, while storage at dot-coms tends to double every 90 days. It has taken humans 300,000 years to accumulate 12 exabytes, or 2 to the 60th power, of stored digital information, but it will take only 2.5 more years to pile up the next 12 exabytes of data, according to an EMC-sponsored study conducted by the University of California, Berkeley.
"It seems that, with the advanced technology that is coming, it will put into question where tape is going to go," said Andrew Lartey, a technical consultant at DHL Worldwide Express, in Hounslow, England. "Hard disks will replace tape in the long run."
On the other side of the argument are companies such as StorageTek that defend tape storage technology as mature and reliable. "Henry Ford said, 'I'll give you any color car you want as long as it's black.' And [EMC's] Ruettgers will give you any product you want as long as it's disk," said Pat Martin, Storage Tek's CEO and chairman, in Louisville, Colo. "Is tape going to be here forever? We don't know. Right now, it is the cheapest storage."
Martin said tape is still ideal for routine functions such as backup. Doing backup on disk would leave companies vulnerable, especially if the hard disks were infected with a virus. "How good is your backup then?" he asked.
But even as it defends tape, Storage Tek is working to reinvent itself from a tape automation and tape library vendor to a company that designs intelligent software to manage data between hard disks and tape. "We are not just a tape automation vendor; we are a storage vendor," Martin said.
That could put StorageTek in a good position to serve customers looking to make the transition from tape to disk storage. Ruettgers said several of EMC's major customers have plans to move away from tape backup. "Once the big ones start, there will be a stampede," he said.
Thus far, users remain divided on the issue, caught between making certain their data is protected for the long term and ensuring it can be backed up and recovered without interruption to the overall system.
WorldCom Inc. reduced its dependence on tape when it asked EMC to develop the WorldCom Symmetrix Remote Data Facility over IP system. "That way we could use IP to back up globally any time we want," said Bob Oliver, chief architecture strategist at a WorldCom engineering site in Colorado Springs.
DHL's Lartey said that once hard disks, which are increasing in capa city and shrinking in size, become as durable as tape, then the revolt will begin. "You won't need tape any longer. I think [tape vendors] know ... in the back of their minds that it will happen soon," he said.
Not every IT manager agrees. Robert Lowe, a technical planner at Toronto-based Hudson's Bay Co., said data loss in hardware is a rarity because of RAID. Instead, data corruption is the most common problem, and the only solution for recovery in that case is tape.
"We've had Oracle database corruption that had nothing to do with hardware. If we didn't have tape backup, we would have been dead in the water," said Lowe, adding that his company's tape needs are growing 20 percent to 30 percent a year.
In addition, tape has one major advantage over hard disks: It's portable.
"And tape density is getting smaller all the time, almost lock step with disk technology," Lowe said.
Bob Amatruda, an analyst with Inter national Data Corp., in Framingham, Mass., said he still sees tape as a billion-dollar industry. "Tape that goes into automation and tape libraries will continue to grow. It's just that higher- capacity devices are being aggregated in tape libraries. In other words, you have fewer direct-attached tape drives and higher-capacity [devices] that are integrated in the library."
