Disk To Outpace Tape In Two Years

February 23rd, 2006: A survey of 2,000 IT professionals claims that tape in its death throes due to demand for faster data recovery times.

The shift to tape is apparently a response to the decrease in time available to the IT departments in which to perform full backups - with the managers claiming that they have less than 60 minutes to perform a complete backup. Even more interestingly from the perspective of the documents and records manager is the claim that retrieval times for files from archive is now seen in hours rather than days.

But this is not the only driver. According to the eponymous, Tom Coughlin of the co-sponsors: "The shift to disk is also tied to the development of continuous data protection [CDP] and other technologies that use disk, CDP may be starting to impact the overall backup market. Right now, some companies perform traditional backups in conjunction with CDP, but if they conclude that CDP gives them the backup requirements they need, then CDP may become their [only type of primary] backup."

The survey also states that compliance (for data retention and discover) legislation in the US is one of the primary drivers for this need for speed. But, while compliance has moved up the concerns list since last year's survey, media reliability has moved down. In fact, the backup process is considered unreliable with 45% of respondents claiming that more than 10% of their backups are unsuccessful.

The survey, entitled Backup and Archive User Perspective Report and carried out in the US by storage consultants, Tom Coughlin Associates and marketing agency, Peripheral Concepts, took a sample of 135 IT administrators and managers from a pool of 2,000.

Is tape really on its way out? Comment here.

Related Article:
SNIA Survey Rates Reliability and Business Continuity As Top Concerns