News

posted on 29 May 2008 05:16

The Clipper Group has compared tape and disk archiving and says tape archives have lifetime ownerships 23 times less and a near 290X energy advantage. Debate over.

It has produced a white paper, sponsored by the LTO Ultrium Group. This looked at total costs of ownership over a five year period for the long-term storage of data in tiered disk-to-disk-to-tape versus disk-to-disk-to-disk solutions.

After factoring in acquisition costs of equipment and media, as well as electricity and data center floor space, Clipper found that the total cost of SATA disk archiving solutions were up to 23 times more expensive than tape solutions for archiving. When calculating energy costs for the competing approaches, the costs for disk were up to 290 times that of tape.

Mike Kahn, managing director of the Clipper Group, and co-author of the white paper, said: “Our goal was to answer the overriding question of ‘how much does it really cost?’ to provide readers with a balanced ‘apples to apples’ comparison of these two archiving approaches. In the end we have determined that a blended environment of disk and tape is the right configuration, incorporating both high performance disk to satisfy contracted SLAs along with the lower TCO figures of tape for long-term storage.“

Co-athor Dave Reine, a director for Enterprise Systems at the grpoup, added this thought: “While the CIO might be anxious to push forward with newer technology, our paper shows that disk-only archiving solutions are not a replacement for tape if cost is at all an issue -- disk should be used to complement tape. Our findings show that there are substantial potential savings when using tape in tiered approaches, and even when you factor in de-duplication, tape-based strategies still provide
an estimated 5:1 cost advantage over de-duped disk in archiving.”

Employing de-duplication can bring down the overall TCO of SATA-based archiving solutions, but tape-based archiving still has an estimated 5:1 advantage

Another finding of the report is that tiered D2D2T solutions can be justified on acquisition costs alone

The Clipper Group paper, “Disk and Tape Square Off Again – Tape Remains King of the Hill with LTO-4,” is available for download from www.ultrium.com/whitepapers. A companion webcast, hosted by Reine and Kahn, is available for archived viewing at www.ultrium.com.

^{[Paul Roberts, news editor.]}