Venyu Blog

The late great Harry Chapin — a “folkie” songwriter, spent his 38 years on this planet telling stories through three part harmonies about life’s many struggles, and its all too few triumphs. Chapin penned a song and, in fact, used it as an album title, called “Dance Band on the Titanic.” The song told the tale, fittingly, of the string quartet immortalized by various movie incarnations and testified by survivors, who continued to play on as the ship plunged into the icy waters of the North Atlantic, nearly 100 years ago.

Given my proclivity for connecting  pop culture with IT I was reminded of Harry recently when I came across a column by Deni Connor in Network World entitled “Tape backup: Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.”

As Deni relates, she recently attended a “Tape Summit”, a conference that brought together, to use her words, a “conclave of tape vendors and industry analysts” in Nevada.

First off, is there really something still called a Tape Summit? Who attends, much less sponsors something like this in the year of our Lord 2011? Is there really anyone left still relying — exclusively that is — on tape for backup?  What’s the construct for the conference? Are there sessions on “How Tape Backup Saved My Business,” “Why LTO for my business stands for Lots To Offer?” All I can think of is something akin to a derivative 12-step program that unites all of the attendees. I can see it all now as each “tape” administrator takes his turn at the dais:

Tape administrator: “Hi My Name is Frank.”

Everyone: “Hi Frank.”

Tape administrator: “And I still use tape.”

Everyone: “Welcome Frank. We understand and support you.” (which is otherwise code for ‘we share your misery and wish our Storage Manager did too.’)

To frame the discussion Deni described the tale of a backup administrator from a Fortune 50 company who was backing up terabytes of data (on tape, of course), storing the data off site and finding the quickest way to do that was to “hand it to a guy with a truck.” Not surprisingly, it became evident to attendees that this approach had a short shelf life that would gradually prove unsustainable (actually the word combustible comes to mind), on a continuing basis.

C’mon already…evolve people!

Deni believes that TMDD, short for “Too Much Damn Data” is the culprit and that we are literally drowning in a sea of data where backing up all of our data on hosts, servers and presumably tape drives just isn’t going to work in the long run, not even with LTO-5. In fact, (and here I praise her for the use of this idiom), “our current solutions are much like rearranging the deck chairs on the sinking Titanic. The deck looks nicer but the ship is still going down.”

The bottom line is this: no matter how you re-arrange your tapes or upgrade to the latest tape drives or identify and retain a reliable (read: bonded) tape company to transport those tapes offsite, tape will never offer the security, efficiency or peace-of-mind available to those companies who backup and recover their valuable data online with Venyu.

And for all of the unconverted “tapeophiles” out there, I have only four words:

Cue the string quartet!