DoSTOR June25, 2008--You're reading analysis on misunderstanding of China Storage users series: Report 1  Don't Put Blind Faith In Disk.

China storage market has experienced rapid growth these years, meanwhile, problems constantly exposed. We will talk about the main three wrong attitudes of Chinese users toward storage. Today, we will discuss the first issue: superstition over disk.

Weaknesses of tape in management has been known for a long time.

Generally, tape was hit by disk proponent in the following aspects. First, tape library and tape drives are mechanical and electrical equipment, affected by mechanical error inevitably. Second, tape itself is so fragile that may be destroyed by strong magnetic, wet or friction. Third, the tape is a sequential access medium, which means low efficiency.

But some experts are exclaiming that people should give tape a chance! Tape is so cheap that people should have a look at it. Columnist Henry Newman noticed "disk is almost 10 times more expensive than tape without compression". That includes cost from two parts: one is the medium (equipment) itself. According to Newman, It"cost $3,456,745/PB for the Sun 6540, compared to $357,049 for LTO-4 with no compression and $178,524 with compression(using IBM tape library)".The other issue is power cost. Obviously, tape needed power when not being used; while disks in arrays or servers consume electricity even nobody access data on it.

Founder and President of Storage Switzerland and Storage Switzerland George Crump said :"Speed of the backup target is really not the issue anymore as a single LTO4 Tape can receive data at an amazing 120 MBs. Even in-line data deduplication devices that are supposed to sacrifice speed for advantages of inline deduplication processing are now receiving data at more than 1 TB per hour. Most servers, infrastructures, and even the backup software itself can't keep up with the ingestion capabilities of the modern backup target".

From contacts with users, we found that many of them gradually becoming "disk fans". That's really blindfold. Since, until now, tape is still a Highly competitive products in the archiving market, particularly with the launch of LTO-4. And power consumption get higher and higher force users to pick up more green devices.