Tapes and close to a quarter-century.

[Paul Lussier]

"Tom Buskey" <tom at buskey.name> writes:

> Lots of companies are going disk based backups w/ tapes for offsite too.
> But that's not archiving.

For achiving data for long periods of time (100+ years, you need a
product that deals with some of the compliance regs like SOX and
HIPPA.  Netapp is rumored to have a product like this, but I don't
really know much about it, and I know EMC has their Centera product,
which I could tell many amusing stories about.  There are other
companies in this area too, HP claims to have something and Sun is
rumored to be able to deal with some of these issues with their
vaporware product code-named Honeycomb.  The most advanced and mature
product in the field seems to be Permabit.  Their product does
compliance, compression, coalescence, encryption, index and search,
can deal natively with CIFS, NFS, and WebDAV connections, and a bunch
of other features.

Centera seems to be the next best product in this area, but they don't
do coalescence well, it has to be used with a product which has been
re-written to deal with the Centera API (unless you use their NFS/CIFS
gateway), it's extremely slow (r/w speeds of around 2-4MBps), indexes
*only* meta-data, not the entire files, and costs a fortune (like
everything from EMC :)

> backup purposes where businesses store a lot of their data offsite, and
>> after Katrina, we learned that local offsite storage facilities are not
>> enough. I worked for a bank DP center in Miami, and we had a tape vault
>> building on the other side of the parking lot. Today, they probably have a
>> duplicate set of tapes in Atlanta.

I know of a lot of companies in the financial and health industries
which actually replicate their archival data across the country.
Especially the financial companies.  9/11 was big wake-up call for
them.  I've read several articles where it's described how some of
these companies, in real-time, will send all data simultaneously to
multiple servers located in physically disparate locations.

If anyone here is on the SAGE members list, this topic pops up
occasionally, as many of the members of SAGE work for Wall Street
firms and get into the real nitty-gritty discussions of how to deal
with this stuff.

-- 
Seeya,
Paul

Disclaimer, I work or have worked for some of the companies mentioned
above, and at other times have used the products of many of the others.