BACKUP YOUR TAPES TO CLOUD
By HSI | April 4, 2023
One of the oldest storage media types that is still in use today is the magnetic tape system, which has been around for about 70 years. The first tape was produced in the year 1905, which had a 720-meter length and the ability to hold up to 1.4 Mega Bytes of data.
Over the years, the tapes have become smaller in size and denser in terms of storing more data and in addition to that there have been a lot of changes in terms of storage formats. Apart from that, there has not been a dramatic change in the tape evolution.
When using this backup system, there are a few hazards to be aware of, particularly if used regularly. Heavy usage of tapes can result in distortion, and the tapes eventually need to be replaced. Additionally, placing these cassettes into the tape drive, taking them out, and sending them away from the site can influence how well the data can be read and for cleaning the box, we must manually insert a cleaning tape. The management of the tape medium, tape rotation, and capacity reclamation require a committed team and backups to tape need to be regularly monitored and, if necessary, restarted.
We can now reduce human involvement to a much smaller extent by substituting virtual tapes for physical tapes in this age of the cloud when bandwidths are no longer a bottleneck. With this we not only save money and eliminate inventory upkeep, but we also ensure that the cloud backups are extremely resilient and have affordable storage. With Tape Backups to the cloud, we are eliminating the physical damage of the tapes, Human Involvement, decrease of Operational Overhead and many more.
Challenge
Issues that one of our customers faced when using an on-premises tape backup solution are:
- Slow Access Speeds
2. High Setup Costs
3. Limit Scalability
4. Technology Refresh Costs
Solution
By carefully evaluating the customers current backup and archiving strategies and performing the cost analysis we proposed the customer to use the Amazon S3 lifecycle policy, and for better redundancy and durability S3 Glacier, S3 Glacier Deep Archive was proposed for backup, archiving and for cost optimization.
While using Tape Gateway to replace physical tapes to virtual tapes in AWS it automatically reduced their data storage cost without changing backup workflows. Tape Gateway supports all backup applications and Caches with low latency data access.
To reduce the above challenge, we used Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets as a network drive and did application-level data backups on the host computer. The content was then moved to the network file share but in the backend the data was being archived in the S3 Glacier and the retrieval times are typically between 3-5 hours for tapes archived in S3 Glacier, and typically within 12 hours for tapes archived in S3 Glacier Deep Archive.
The virtual tapes which were stored in S3 Glacier Deep Archive were replicated and stored in across 3 availability zones protected by 11 9s of durability. When stored in S3 bucket, AWS performs fixity checks on regular basis to confirm the data. All tapes stored in S3 glacier deep archive are protected by S3 encryption using KMS keys.
When compared the experience of warehouse tapes vs Virtual Tapes, Tape gateway always ensures the correct data.
Benefits
- Seamless replacement for the existing systems and workflows
- Reduced maintenance cost by eliminating physical tape devices and hardware
- Low-cost simple licensing and predictable storage cost
- Security military-grade encryption of all data
- Durability 11 nines durability
- Accessibility all backup data in one console