Bruce Backa's Storage Blog: The New Economics @ VIRTUALIZATION JOURNAL

Bruce Backa's Storage Blog: The New Economics

"Writing tapes everyday is error-prone and costly. You just shouldn't do it any more".

Dec. 1, 2005 06:00 AM

Bruce Backa's Storage Blog: The New Economics

We have all watched the price of on-line storage decrease year after year. While it is still neither infinite nor free (and it's certainly not free to manage), it is pretty inexpensive these days. So inexpensive, in fact, that tape is now dramatically more expensive.

This cost inversion (tape used to be much cheaper than on-line storage) should change the way we manage our storage.

If you are a large corporation with sites all around the world, you need to replicate your data to these sites anyway. If London, New York and LA have all ceased to exist, you probably won't care much about the tapes at Iron Mountain... Trust me, your concerns will be elsewhere. As a result, there is really no need to have any of these tapes.It's a costly security blanket that really accomplishes nothing.

A smaller company needs tapes for disaster recovery, (although on-line vendor-based alternatives exist) but daily backups should be on-line. Writing tapes everyday is error-prone and costly. You just shouldn't do it anymore.

Posted 12/1/2005, 5:16AM EST

About Bruce Backa
Bruce Backa is the founder of CriticalSites. A noted business leader and consultant in the IT Industry, he has acted as chief architect, technologist, and project manager for assignments involving large scale Technology and Implementation Strategies. He has held the positions of Director of Technology and Business Research for the American Stock Exchange (AMEX) and Director of Technology for American International Group. Mr. Backa has been responsible for the architecture, implementation and management of a worldwide Client/Server networking infrastructure for a Fortune 10 company, with a platform of over 600 Servers connecting 10,000 users across 50 cities throughout North America and off shore. In 1994, he founded NTP Software, a provider of business solutions for Windows NT and Windows 2000. At the recent World Economic Forum in Switzerland, Mr. Backa was recognized as a technology pioneer. This follows a similar award from the National Computer Conference in 1974 where he was honored as a part of the Dartmouth College team that invented computer timesharing.