Tape backup systems still play a vital role

Tape backup systems still play a vital role

By Zatni Arbi

JAKARTA (JP): What has the love affair between business and
information technology (IT) brought us? Today we are swamped by
data. It is now so easy to capture and collect data -- through
Websites, through Point of Sales (POS) systems and through other
online facilities.

Some of this data is legal, some is not. A lot of it actually
belongs to the gray area. Case in point is the data collected by
an Internet company called DoubleClick, which has been collecting
data through five billion online ads that it serves. DoubleClick
has been under forceful pressure from consumers and privacy
advocates in the U.S. due to its plan to merge its data with the
data on printed catalog consumers collected by Abacus Direct, a
company with which it struck a deal for a US$1.7 billion merger
late last year.

Black, white or gray, the volume of data collected since
computers became widely used in business is really staggering.
With the Web now becoming the source of music, video and
broadcasting, in addition to the ordinary "passive" data like
your identity and mine, the Internet has caused the data storage
business explode, as testified to by the recent IPOs of several
companies specializing in data storage.

However, if your business relies on data storage, you must
also have a data backup system. Much like security, data backup
should be part of your IT plan right from the outset. Current
estimates say that there is a 3.5 percent probability a business
will go bust if it ever suffers from a permanent loss of data.
Today, we discuss some of technology that is available on the
newest tape backup offered by HP, the SureStore DAT40x6
Autoloader.

Tape backup may seem to have disappeared into the background
as people take the single QIC (Quarter Inch Cartridge) Colorado
tape backup for granted. The fact is, new technology is still
being introduced to tape backup products, making them a reliable
solution for small, medium and even large enterprises.

For your home PC, however, investing in a tape backup would be
overkill. A Zip drive, a CD-Writer or an account at @backup (a
website where you can store your backup files) is sufficient.

Unattended backup

Small enterprises are usually defined as companies with less
than 100 employees and no permanent IT manager who would ensure
that backup of data has been properly performed, tapes are
rotated correctly and the drive is clean and in good health.
Therefore, what they would like to have is a backup system that
manages itself, in addition to automatically creating backup from
the primary storage of their server or servers. Automated backup
is a must, because normal human beings simply hate having to get
out of their bed in the wee hours to do the backup in the ever-
shrinking backup window (in case you get a little curious, the
backup window is a time span in which you can backup your data --
typically after the last person in your organization stops
working at night and before the first person starts working the
next morning). The SureStore DAT40x6 is a good example of the
products that fit these requirements.

Launched at the beginning of last month, this DAT-based tape
autoloader can be fed with up to six tape cartridges inserted
into a magazine. The robotics inside the device will pick the
correct cartridge and insert it into the DAT drive. The included
TapeWare backup software will allow users to schedule automatic
backup.

This tape backup device uses DDS-4 data storage specification.
However, it is backward compatible, and can use DDS-3 and DDS-2
formats. It can read certain formats of DDS-1.

Like several of its CD-Writer, HP has also added a automated
disaster recovery feature to the tape backup. So, in case the
entire hard disk needs to be restored, for example after hardware
crash and repair, the user will only need to press the Eject
button, power up the device and then reboot the server. Because
everything -- including a disaster recovery (DR) image -- has
been backed up on the tape, there will be no need to reload the
operating systems and applications from separate CDs or disks.

I found the One Button Disaster Recovery feature that HP has
added to this DAT autoloader quite interesting. While Unix
workstations can traditionally boot from a tape drive, the BIOS
of a PC is not normally equipped with the capability to boot from
a sequential storage system such as a tape (in a tape, data is
stored sequentially -- one after the other).

So, as explained in the white paper that I got from HP, this
feature has been added to make the tape drive work in a CD-ROM
mode. Once the PC is tricked into believing the drive is a CD-ROM
drive, the system can boot from it as if from a bootable CD-ROM,
and everything -- operating system, applications and data -- can
be restored. Once the restoration process is started, the system
will reboot and the tape drive will assume its native mode.

Other features

As the tape itself may leave some particles on the drive's
head, drive makers now add an automatic mechanism for cleaning
it. HP does it by loading a cleaning tape at a scheduled time.

"Suppose you use one tape cartridge to backup your data on
Monday, another for Tuesday and so on, you will use five
different cartridges every week if your business runs from Monday
to Friday," explained Lee Chin Keong, Commercial Business Manager
of HP's AP Information Storage Group, "The sixth cartridge
contains the cleaning tape." Cleaning can be done on Sundays, for
example. The drive also has a sapphire blade that constantly
touches the tape surface and sweeps all the tape debris away.

Everything that moves suffers from tear-and-wear, and a tape
drive is no exception. The good thing about today's tape backup
drives is that they are equipped with some intelligence that
constantly measures the performance in real time and makes the
necessary compensation to ensure the integrity of the backup
data.

The tape backup market is still going strong. For high-end
servers in large enterprises, the Digital Linear Tape (DLT) is
the choice. DLT technology was first developed by Digital
Equipment Corporation, which is now owned by Quantum. It provides
not only larger storage capacity but also faster access time.
While the DAT40x6 can transfer data at the rate of 6 MB/s (with
2:1 hardware compression) and can store up to 40 GB per tape
cartridge (also with 2:1 hardware compression), HP's high-end DLT
Autoloader 818 has a native transfer rate of 6 MB per second and
offers a total of up to 320 GB of backup storage capacity.

Incidentally, if you happen to lose your mission-critical data
despite all the backup systems that you have put in place, there
may still be hope to get it back. DisTek (www.distek.com) is a
U.S.-based company that can go to the physical level of your hard
disk and retrieve it. DisTek claims a 95 percent success rate,
which is really impressive. You will have to weigh the value of
your lost data against the cost of retrieving it, of course.