Tape backup is still relevant and should be supported
Backup on tape provides hidden advantages by offering an affordable, offline backup of data that is truly inaccessible to hacking and corruption. Keeping data impervious to modern threats like ransomware, is only 100% guaranteed when exposed systems are disconnected. Tape backup drives offers a viable, offline source for data protection that is secure and suitable for long-term storage.
Even in the times of private cloud services, SAN snapshots, SSD’s, and cheap public cloud storage, backup on tape is widely relevant. Legacy data is still saved to Windows backup tape within Fortune 100 companies and government agencies worldwide.
While many of NovaStor’s competitors no longer support backup on tape or never have, NovaStor has supported tape backup since its inception and continues to support this under-served market. Rather than make users choose between storage technologies, NovaStor supports a wide range of devices to help businesses build a tiered backup strategy, tailored to their unique needs, including:
- Single tape drive backup
- Tape libraries and autoloaders
- Dynamic tape drive sharing
- Backup-to-Disk, Disk-to-Disk-to-Tape, Virtual Tape Library
If you have large amounts of data to store and want a fast, efficient, affordable storage method, our backup experts can help you explore the best tape backup software to use.
Efficient Use of Tape Libraries
Today's tape libraries achieve enormous writing speeds. They read or write at more than a hundred MB per second and several hundred GB per hour. If during the backup process only a single stream is writing to the tape drive, the backup cannot even begin to utilize the drives' full speed potential.
Using a tape drive in a tape library without being able to fully benefit from its capacity, simply does not justify the investment.
With multistreaming (also known as multi-threading) the backup takes place at the maximum speed of a tape drive as it allows the data to be transferred in multiple parallel streams rather than in one long data stream. To make the best use of the high write speeds of the devices, the backup data is sent to the device at a constant data rate. If the data rate should drop, the device may also reduce its read speed, thereby slowing down the backup.
With client multistreaming, all backup data is transferred to the backup server within a short period of time. On the server, the complete backup data load is kept in the buffer, which allows the backup server to pick as many data packages from the buffer as the tape library can write. This ensures that the tape drive achieves maximum write speed. As enough backup data becomes available in the buffer, the backup server sustains the data transfer speed. For more information on how to reduce your backup and restore windows with mMultistreaming, download our whitepaper on multistreaming.
There are a lot of highly circulated myths about tape backup systems. Download our whitepaper on data tape backup now and separate the fact from the fiction.
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