The long term viability of tape in the enterprise is something we’re debating internally at the moment. Some of our pain points are:

• Effective management of various backup jobs to fit within our backup window.
• Cost of tape collection and storage.
• Prolonged recovery times due to tape recollection from off-site storage and subsequent restoration.
• Maintaining a variety of tape formats within our business.

Our requirements are:

• Twice daily snapshot of core data available for instant recovery.
• Daily backup stored off-site and retained for 4 weeks.
• Monthly backup stored off-site and retained for 1 year.
• Annual backup stored off-aite and retained for 7 years.

We have 2 main sites each with an EMC Celerra NS120. We’re looking to utilise snapshot and replication to achieve some of our requirements, then augment our investment with virtual tape library, de-duplication and archiving technology to hit the rest.

I’ll be completing a 60 second interview on the subject in the next few days that will be published on the Storage Expo website. I’ll post the link once it’s up and go into more detail on my thoughts.