Deduplication Still Lags Behind Tape

Tape is not dead and still a preferred storage medium adopted by enterprises, asserts Nick Harper, VP- EMEA & APAC, Spectra Logic. In an interaction with Biztech2.com, Harper expresses his candid views on tape vs. deduplication, and where the market is headed.

Where is India on the storage map?

India is among the highest growth markets in terms of storage. Storage, especially archiving and back up are becoming important. There have been a number of high profile instances relating to loss of data in the financial services sector that have been embarrassing and marred reputation. There is growing awareness among both the commercial and the government sector regarding data protection. Which is where archiving becomes essential. The archive market especially has grown tremendously, driven partly by the regulatory requirements as well as the capabilities that it offers.

Tape v/s deduplication. What is your take on this?

I’ve been in the industry for a while now and have been hearing that tape is dead. But, it is not. The buzz around deduplication started around three years ago, but we’re seeing that most organisations are disappointed with this technology. Almost everyone has discovered that if you use a deduplication front end, you still need tape because it remains the only viable option for long term archiving. A lot of enterprises have realised that deduplication performance is not quite what they were hoping for. This means that cost of deduplication is part of the appeal and that it could bring the cost of disk down close to the cost of tape and also allow you to get by with much less disk utilisation. But, in terms of long term archival the question whether it is as good and reliable as tape still remains.

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Unless you get enormous deduplication compression, it translates into disappointment for end users. We have seen this realisation sinking among the enterprise clients. A number of them have spent two or three years evaluating deduplication strategies and have concluded that either they don’t work at all or that deduplication is just an adjunct.

How does the adoption landscape for deduplication look in India?

Despite its drawbacks there was a lot of interest around deduplication in India. However, India has been fortunate because by the time the fad reached here, there was a general realisation and understanding of what the technology could offer. Fortunately India doesn’t have to pack away everything and start from scratch. Therefore, I think less money has been wasted in bulk buying. Hence, companies don’t have much to lose.

There was a mantra for almost a couple of years that deduplication is the answer, doesn’t matter what the question is, it is the answer. But, it isn’t so now. Nevertheless, deduplication does have its place, though only in some niche applications.

What is Spectra Logic’s Tfinity offering?

Tfinity is the latest tape library from Spectra Logic, and is the largest library in our family. It scales to over twenty thousand tape cartridges, and is aimed at enterprises, government, high performance computing, media and entertainment, large banks and enterprises with extremely large archives, with the need for very high reliability, performance and scalability. Features such as remote monitoring, media lifecycle management assure that the content in the archive remains valid all the time.