Is your organization seeing massive increases in data creation, while being challenged to meet specific data compliance rules? Regardless if you must adhere to the regulations of HIPAA, FACTA, Sarbanes-Oxley, SOX, or any others, it can be a major challenge to build up the right infrastructure, policies and procedures to comply.
As revealed by major organizations such as Yahoo, Google, and Facebook, anything can go wrong -- at any time. There can be anything from security breaches, to bugs, to system failures. This is why a reported 80 percent of organizations make use of a combination of disk and tape.
Just when many “experts” in the data storage industry were raving about disk and/or the cloud being the end-all-be-all -- LTO magnetic data media has come to the rescue.
Here’s why:
1. LTO tape is stable and can be stored for 30-plus years.
2. The latest versions of LTO hold massive amounts of data -- so it’s very cost-effective.
3. ZERO energy cost to archive data offline.
4. Disk’s online nature makes susceptible to hackers, bugs, viruses, and more.
5. When disk comes crashing down, LTO backups save the day.
6. Tape can be recycled and reused.
Using magnetic data media along side disk, is a perfect scenario. Data that needs to be constantly and quickly accessed can be stored on disk. LTO data media can be used for continuous backups. Thus, if anything goes wrong, data can be recovered in a timely manner.
When considering data compliance, tape provides 100 percent assurance that an organizations most important data is always secure. The fact that data can completely be expunged via degaussing, also makes tape valuable where compliance is concerned.
Have questions about industry compliance and your data storage setup? We would love to help. Give us a call and we can help point you in the right direction.
Have tape and data center equipment that you want to get rid of? We buy used tape cartridges, disk array, tape libraries, and more.
Contact us today: Info@BigDataSupplyInc.com | Toll Free 800-905-7329 | Local 949-679-6633
In today’s big data world, it’s vital that all organizations pay close attention to their data storage needs - especially if video is a part of the scenario.
The common story is that videos are developed and made available 24 x 7. This puts massive demands on infrastructure. The same is true of storing large amounts of photos, customer data, and transactional data.
Here are some things to keep in mind when considering your own infrastructure:
1. Define Your Needs
We’ve mentioned time and time again the importance of knowing what you need by way of short-term and long-term storage. The more you can define and predict where you are heading in the coming months and years, the better off you will be.
2. Consider Using Less Intensive Video Types
If you are continually growing your video library, you may want to consider streaming videos in Flash and/or offering low and high-res video options.
Many organizations are using tiered storage infrastructures that help speed up access to data and make data management much easier.
3. Stick with Tape
While you may find yourself using disk for many of your data storage needs, we strongly urge you to use tape when possible and tape is an obvious choice for long term archiving.
A growing number of organizations are realizing that regular data backups to tape are cost-effective and reliable. Plus, they are discovering the power of using tape as an active archive. This allows for them to restore datasets to disk at any time.
LTO-5 and LTO-6 are excellent for active archives for numerous reasons -- but most importantly, each tape holds a massive amount of data and has an easy to use file system (LTFS) for easy organization and data retrieval.
4. Think Twice About Relying on the Cloud
It’s becoming quite clear -- the cloud offers many advantages, but without regular data backups it may be dangerous. Make sure you have a backup system in place. We also recommend tape backups in this case.
If you are using tape please tape keep in mind that we at Big Data Supply, Inc. will purchase your excess new and out of archive data tape media cartridges. Recoup some of your initial investment with this highly secure and eco-friendly recycling option.
Have questions about your emerging data infrastructure? We can help you out. Drop us an e-mail or call and we’ll steer you in the right direction!
Contact us today: Info@BigDataSupplyInc.com | Toll Free 800-905-7329 | Local 949-679-6633
We buy New and Used LTO6 Data Tape Media. All Brands.
As you may already be aware, the Linear Tape Open Consortium made LTO-6 tape technology available to the market in the latter part of 2012. Defying the ridiculous claims by data storage experts that tape would be dead by now, the LTO community was thrilled at what they had accomplished with the LTO-6.
To give you an idea of their accomplishments, we will outline a handful of facts you should know about the impressive technology:
• LTO-6 holds up to 6.25TB of compressed data. Wildly enough, the medium’s capacity has more than doubled and its throughput boosted by more than 40 percent. This is excellent news for organizations wanting to keep their tape storage costs down, while accommodating massive amounts of data.
• LTO-6 Drives Offer 400MBps Performance. This means that it uses a 2.5:1 compression ratio and allows for up to 1.4TB of data transferred per hour. Now data management is much easier and time effective.
• Industry leading brands now ship LTO-6. Organizations with major data storage systems can rely on HP, IBM, Quantum, Fujifilm, Hitachi, Maxell, Imation, Sony, and TDK for their LTO-6 products. These brands understand the true value of tape and are committed to making it readily available to the world.
• LTO-6 includes encryption and WORM. These features were also offered in LTO-3, LTO-4, and LTO-5. Encryption helps secure important data, while WORM allows for organizations to store data in a non-rewritable format. They both help organizations meet compliance regulations as set forth by the SEC, Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, SOX, and more.
• LTO-6 Includes Partitioning Functionality, also known as LTFS. The Linear Tape File System is much of the reason data storage experts are eating their previous words that went something like “tape is dead.” Now it is possible to drag and drop files, which makes tape work in a very similar manner as a removable disk drive.
On a daily basis our team is asked by organizations to help them make cost-effective choices for their data storage infrastructures. We can’t be more thrilled with the LTO Consortium and the technologies they have made available in the recent months and years. Not only is LTO-6 impressive from a technical standpoint, it is very durable and can last for 30 or more years.
It has been said time and time again that “the steady horse wins the race.” In our minds, tape is the steady and reliable horse for safely storing data for decades to come.
