“The writing is on the wall for tape backup at remote sites”
Eran Farajun, Asigra

Earlier this year, Symantec, a leader in tape backup solutions, followed its acquisition last year of Veritas and Data Center Technologies (DCT) with the launch of Veritas NetBackup 6.0 PureDisk Remote Office Edition. PureDisk is aimed directly at distributed enterprises and solely at replacing tapes at remote sites with disk-based backup.

When a market share leader makes such a bold statement about its strategy by launching a disk-based backup solution specifically for remote offices of a distributed enterprise, you know the writing is on the wall for tape backup at remote sites. There is no stronger acknowledgement that remote office backup is best served by disk than with this move by Symantec. The king of offsite tape warehousing, Iron Mountain, has also recognised the necessity of being able to assure guaranteed business continuity (BC) and disaster recovery (DR) at remote offices and has gradually made acquisitions of software companies - Connected and LiveVault - over the past two years in order to deliver backup via the WAN. The obvious implication is that Iron Mountain is hedging its bets on future reduction of tapes at remote sites and starting to expand its electronic data storage services. Transporting data physically, via trucks across large expanses of land and sea, is inevitably less secure and time and cost-efficient than moving it intelligently via the WAN.

Symantec’s own promotion of PureDisk cites security as a major concern of tape backup, something which Iron Mountain has first-hand experience in. In April last year, it allegedly lost the backup tapes of City National Bank, leading to an official recommendation that companies should encrypt backup tapes. Statistically, the number of tape losses is a small percentage of what Iron Mountain transports annually, but as in the case of the lost Time Warner tapes a month after City National Bank in May 2005, it does not follow that the lost data is insignificant. In this instance, Iron Mountain allegedly lost backup tapes that contained key personal data, including the Social Security numbers of 600,000 former and current Time Warner employees. Although tapes can be encrypted to prevent unauthorised access to the backed up data, no company can give a 100% guarantee against human error. Once lost, the data on those tapes is irretrievable, making the customer’s entire backup procedure pointless. However, the most significant aspect of the new market strategy from Symantec and Iron Mountain is the obvious impact BC, DR and regulatory compliance have had on shaping today’s storage market.

To be compliant with all the recent laws, companies want to make sure they can retrieve data within hours not days, and at remote offices this is virtually impossible with tape-based backup. Indeed, as a best practice for business, many companies are turning up the pressure and demand fast recovery, guaranteed BC and achievable Recovery Point Objectives (RPOs) and Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) for all their data. A cost-effective and clever way storage companies can deliver this for the geographically dispersed sites is with online backup. The importance of remote office data has slowly become a concern for larger storage solution providers; something which smaller and more specialised companies have known for years. There are market studies indicating that for multi-site companies, between 70%-80% of their data resides outside the four walls of their data centre at remote offices. Larger companies need to shift their focus from the data centre outward. Moving with the times is the only way to survive, but trying to jump onto the remote office bandwagon at the last moment might not convince customers that these hastily provided remote backup solutions will deliver the RPOs, RTOs, DR and guaranteed BC that they need. Specialised companies such as Asigra and Riverbed have been designing remote backup technology for decades and years respectively, and are providing the market with solutions that are the result of years of listening, responding, and anticipating their customers’ remote office protection needs. A Gartner Report from earlier this year, ‘Cool Vendors in Data Protection, 2006’, states that “Disk-based backup and therefore disk-based recoveries will be the most significant technology impact on recovery in the next five years.” The branching out by Iron Mountain and Symantec manifests this for remote backup and recovery: tape is on the way out and disk is the future. It will be interesting to see what technologies will emerge as alternatives to disk, as disk is slowly but surely gaining market share from tape. Will it be the smaller more malleable companies that take action first? Or will the big guns learn from disk’s steady climb to the top of backup and keep their eyes peeled for the next up and coming technology?