An increasing number of organizations are making the move from tape to disk backup with deduplication, so we're pleased to share lessons learned from our customer base of 2,400+ installations with you. Below are 7 tips and best practices that will help you assess the potential fit and steps you might take for moving from tape to disk backup.
Tip 1: Realistically assess the shortcomings of tape and potential consequences
Everyone knows that tape can be cumbersome and require a considerable amount of manual intervention to successfully perform regular backups. Tape backups must be monitored, equipment needs to be maintained and heads must be cleaned for backups to run properly. Tapes must be loaded and changed, labeled correctly, and physically transported off-site for disaster recovery. In virtualized server environments, many backup applications do not support tape, and tape does not allow use of advanced options in backup software.
As an organization's data grows, many organizations face long nightly backup windows, and in many cases, backups can't always be completed within the allotted timeframe. That means backups are often aborted, leaving incomplete data that may be unusable in the event of an emergency. And even if a tape backup is performed successfully, the data isn't always available for a number of reasons.
Here are some sobering tape backup statistics to consider:
Business Impact of Failed Tape Backups
The downsides of using tape can affect virtually every person who works within an organization or who does business with it. Users and customers are negatively impacted, not to mention the IT department. Below are a few examples:
According to the National Computer Security Association, without adequate backup, it takes 21 days and $19,000 to recreate 20MB of lost accounting data, and 42 days and $98,000 to recreate 20MB of lost engineering data.
When a major U.S. trucking company suffered a recent crash, they achieved significant savings with a quick recovery that resulted from using disk with deduplication instead of tape. They avoided two days of system downtime and a loss of $200,000 in business and productivity that would have resulted if they had to restore their database from their previous tape backup system.
In one highly-publicized incident, a 2007 data backup failure by the Alaska Department of Revenue wiped out data on a $38 billion account and cost the state $200,000 to restore the data.
Tip 2: Determine your key drivers and align them with budgetary priorities
Projects to replace tape are invariably tied to a failure of existing systems to execute reliable backups, a need for better IT productivity or cost savings, or a new business initiative. Below are six of the most common drivers for replacing tape with disk.
- Backup times exceed the available backup window (and everything practical to bring backup times back in the window has been tried)
- Tape library is dying or dead, or the IT maintenance burden or costs have become excessive
- Project to improve offsite disaster recovery, and need something better than tape for RPO and RTO
- Currently writing to straight disk, and the amount of disk is growing and getting expensive
- VMware/virtualization backup project, and you want to go all disk and shut off tape
- Data center consolidation project
Tip 3: Take a side-by-side comparison of tape headaches and disk benefits
Fortunately, it's now possible to significantly streamline the backup process with disk. Disk provides numerous benefits over tape, so that backups are painless and successfully completed each night.

Tip 4: Understand how data deduplication and compression technologies are putting disk-based backup within reach.
Disk-based backup systems combine low-cost SATA disk, data compression, and data deduplication to provide fast and reliable disk-based backups and restores at about the price of tape. Utilizing data deduplication and compression, backup data can be stored in anywhere between 1/10th to 1/50th the storage space, greatly reducing the disk needed for backup and therefore cutting the overall cost. Using these systems, organizations can reduce or eliminate tape and shorten backup windows by as much as 30 to 80 percent with the small footprint of disk.
Consider the case of an organization that keeps 12 full backups on-site or off-site. Without data deduplication, 60TB of disk would be required to backup 5TB of data, at a total cost which would make disk backup impractical. Using disk backup with deduplication to backup the same 60TB of data is far less expensive. Only the bytes that have changed are stored for each previous backup, and since just two percent of bytes typically change from backup to backup, the result is that only the 100GB that change at the byte-level per week (out of the original 5TB) need be stored. Taking it one step further, the most recent backup (compressed to 2.5TB) plus 11 weeks of byte-level deltas at 100GB gives you a total of 3.6TB (2.5TB + 11 x 100GB). Instead of taking 60TB, the use of compression and deduplication brings the total down to 3.6TB.
Tip 5: Define functional requirements to meet business goals
Once it has been determined that tape is going to be replaced by disk backup with data deduplication, the following essential capabilities should be considered:
- Storage efficiency ranging from 10:1 to 50:1 via byte-level data deduplicatio
- Quick installation with a turnkey plug-and-play appliance
- No change to your existing backup application via NAS interface
- Shortest backup window, using post-process deduplication
- Fastest restore and tape copy by storing a full recent backup copy
- No performance degradation or forklift upgrades as data grows via GRID scalability
- Scalability from 1TB to 100TBs (over 1 Petabyte logical)
- Fast disaster recovery via WAN-efficient replication and rapid restore of last full copy
- Deduplication and replication status via job-level reporting
- Low price and IT operational costs through architecture purpose-built for backup
Tip 6: Eliminate tape and cost-effectively replace it with disk
Organizations use disk backup with deduplication to cost-effectively eliminate tape on-site, and optionally to also eliminate tape entirely for both on-site backup and long-term off-site retention. Disk backup with deduplication is extremely economical for a second site because the data deduplication technology only moves changes, so minimal WAN bandwidth is required. In a typical scenario where only two percent of the data has changed, disk backup with deduplication delivers as much as a 50:1 data efficiency over the WAN. Once the first backup is sent to the remote site, only the bytes that change are sent. And the software on most systems is intelligent enough to merge those bytes that change into the off-site backup, so that both backup copies are entirely up to date with the most recent backup. The systems can also cross-protect, so two sites can act as disaster recovery sites for each other. A combined on-site and off-site system would completely eliminate tape, provide significantly faster backups and restores, and reduce IT intervention, management and maintenance. It also ensures superior security, since the system and its data sits in a data center environment.
Despite the clear operational advantages of shorter backup and recovery times, greater reliability, reduced risk of failure, increased data retention, and enhanced IT productivity, improving backup via disk-based backup with deduplication requires an investment whose payback can be difficult to quantify. Fortunately for IT managers, significant performance and productivity gains are achievable at a cost comparable to tape, and some customers report paybacks in as fast as several days to 6 months. Check out the complete guide for more information on this.
Tip 7: Entrust your backup to vendors and value-added resellers with a track record of success
Customers looking to replace tape with disk will typically turn to vendors or value-added resellers with whom they already have a trusted relationship. Be aware that many larger IT vendors do not offer a best-of-breed disk backup with deduplication solution that satisfies the requirements of Step 5.
As you look to partners and vendors, make sure you can verify the track record of successful deployments for the specific disk backup product you are considering. While some tape-drive providers are introducing new disk-based solutions, they may not have a track record of successful deployments with the new technology, leaving your investment and data protection at risk. As older tape backup technologies need to be replaced, organizations should look for customer success stories with other similar users, and also perform a cost/benefit analysis to evaluate which backup technology best meets their budget and functional needs.
To get more details, click here to get the complete 7-Step tape replacement guide.