Venyu Blog

There are first sentences of articles in technology publications I subscribe to that land like a thud and I immediately ignore, others that hoist a stop sign in front of me and demand I read further and even those that set off the ringing echo of Timpanis that herald the overture to 2001: A Space Odyssey. The following sentence, however, I liken more to a Boeing 777 jet engine revving for takeoff: “Phil Mentesana, chief technology officer at Delphi Capital Management, knew that backing up critical data tapes and schlepping them offsite for safe storage wasn’t exactly a smart plan.”

The article, included in the hard copy as well as the online version of CIO Magazine, April 2010, includes Phil’s long-term challenges both from a resource as well as an investment basis, in storing data on tape. These include having an administrator spend as many as 20 hours a week organizing and labeling tapes and the occasional tape failures which compounded IT headaches and operational costs. As Phil is quoted, “It was a wreck and we had to fix it.”

For example, Phil points out that his costs for maintenance and upgrade activities easily approached $10,000 with an additional $60,000 on the table to hire a full-time administrator just to manage his tape library. For Phil, enough was enough and he opted instead to store his data in the cloud, using a software-as-a-service online backup provider.

Phil found that by replacing a tape-based backup system with an SaaS service, Delphi Capital eliminated 20 hours a week of mundane administrative tasks and avoided hiring that IT administrator at the aforementioned salary of $60,000 a year.

The bottom line is that eventually someone, somewhere, invents a better mousetrap. It happened when VHS vaulted over Betamax, and when the compact disc trumped vinyl records.  It’s happening still with landlines fast becoming a relic as the Apple iPhone (and its many imitators), becomes the new standard in its class. No equivocation there.  And now online backup (e.g. cloud computing) is satisfying IT’s inexorable appetite for storage. Tape has had its moment in the sun, and then some, but sooner or later the world moves on and simply put tape cannot possibly hope to keep up with the explosion of data storage and the dependability demanded of it. As Mentesana himself explains in summary, “Tape media is just not reliable.” Kind of says it all, doesn’t it?