Virtual Tape Coming of Age

By Maria Trombly | Securities Industry News | April 12, 2004

April 12, 2004 - It looks like tape storage to your computer system but costs twice as much and can't be put in a box and stored away, or shipped somewhere overnight. But virtual tape--otherwise known as disk libraries--has finally hit the big time, with a new product from storage goliath EMC Corp.

The Clariion Disk Library, released last week, lists from $109,000 for a 500-gigabyte model to $450,000 for 32 terabytes. It can emulate up to 32 separate tape libraries and compresses data at a three-to-one ratio, the first time EMC has offered compression on a disk array.

"It reduces the risk associated with a tape-only backup environment," said Phil Goodwin, an analyst at Meta Group.

According to Goodwin, between five and 20 percent of all backup jobs don't take. "What the disk library does is reduce a lot of the reasons why backup jobs do fail," he said, "like tape drive failures and media failure. If you have a tape-only backup environment, then you have significant risk of data loss. A tape-only backup strategy can no longer be considered a good business practice."

For example, at Boston's CDC IXIS Capital Markets North America, the disk libraries are expected to reduce the firm's reliance on tape and make backups more reliable--especially when it comes to automated, unattended processing of multi-terabyte data-backup operations. David Kadow, the firm's director of systems administration and infrastructure, said the EMC disk library easily integrated into the existing backup infrastructure.

But the disk arrays don't completely replace tapes, Goodwin pointed out. "Tape is still far and away the least expensive method for retaining data for long periods," he said. This is an issue for Street firms, given SEC and other regulators' requirements for long-term backups. Tapes can also be taken to an off-site facility, whereas moving a disk array is not practical. Instead, he said, the disk arrays work best as intermediaries between a company's systems and its tape libraries. They make backups and restores faster and more efficiently.

There are a few other vendors with similar products, Goodwin said, but the EMC disk library will certainly be attractive to firms that use other EMC products. Unlike other virtual tape products, EMC's offering allows for restores directly from the disk, said senior marketing manager Sean Kinney.