Tape Consolidation

Minimize Your Tape Infrastructure and Lower Costs

Challenge

For decades, tape was the de facto medium for storing backup data and for transporting data offsite for disaster protection because of low cost. Conventional disk-based backup systems are still too expensive to replace the existing tape infrastructure. In fact, the general application for these disk systems is to act as a fast cache or staging before copying backup data to tape.

In addition, some regulations mandate the use of removable media for long-term archival, still requiring tape.

However, tape continues to be unreliable, cumbersome and highly manual. Ideally, the more tape use can be centralized and consolidated to one location, the more likely that operational recovery and archiving will be done correctly by concentrating expertise and IT resources.

Solution

Data Domain deduplication storage systems provide months of data retention capacity at <$0.35/GB; lower than tape. This allows enterprises to use Data Domain systems for day-to-day backup, recovery and other nearline applications.

Data Domain deduplication technology enables network-efficient replication, enabling a centralized data protection and tape consolidation model and further reducing the need for tape infrastructure.

Other ways Data Domain lowers tape-related infrastructure costs:

• Upgrades to the tape infrastructure can be deferred, since it is only used for offsite archiving. Local backups are sent to Data Domain systems then consolidated and copied to tape in the background.
• Only a subset of backups may need to be copied to tape. For example, a service level agreement may dictate that only monthly full backups are duplicated to tape and retained for an extended period, further reducing tape drive and removable media costs.