ExaGrid vs Tape Library

For many years, backing up to a tape library has been the dominant method for performing backups to protect your organization’s data. Many IT organizations, however, have grown dissatisfied with tape-based backups and are looking for alternatives that offer fast backups and restores, scalability with no forklift upgrades, fast disk-based offsite disaster recovery, and a low IT maintenance burden . Disk backup with data deduplication is one such alternative, and it’s now available at a price comparable to a new tape library.
Why the move from a tape library? The problems with tape are well known: slow backups and restores, backups fail, restores fail, labels fall off, tape is mislabeled, and tape can be lost, stolen, or damaged. Tape backups must be monitored. Equipment needs to be maintained and heads cleaned for backups to be run properly. And tapes must be loaded and changed, labeled correctly, and physically transported off-site (and then back on-site) for disaster recovery.
According to Gartner and Storage magazine, 34% of companies backup their data to tape and do not test their backups. And an amazing 77% of those companies who do test their tape backups found backup failures (Boston Computing Network Data Loss statistics). Furthermore, a 2009 Symantec Disaster Recovery survey found that 65% of companies do not have adequate backup protection for virtual server environments. Many of these virtualized environments still rely on tape.
Disk, on the other hand, is fast and reliable for both backup and restores. The table below compares tape vs disk for selected attributes:

ExaGrid’s disk backup with deduplication not only overcomes the challenge of tape, but it offers the following benefits:

• Fast backups: typically 40-90% faster than tape, utilizing post-process deduplication which lands the data to disk and then deduplicates after the data is already protected
• Fast restores: by keeping a full copy of the data on disk in non-deduplicated form
• Scalability: GRID architecture allows seamless scalability from 3.5TB to 320TB raw capacity, allowing full backups from 1TB to 130TB with no forklift upgrades or degradation in backup performance as data grows
• Offsite DR: an optional second-site configuration allows for WAN-efficient replication of data to an offsite disaster recovery location
• Low IT management burden: Customers using a plug-and-play disk backup with deduplication system typically spend only a small amount of time each week managing backups. Many report saving 10-20 hours/week or more vs tape, thus freeing time for more important IT priorities

In summary, ExaGrid’s disk backup with data deduplication eliminates the problems and management burden of tape with a solution that offers the fastest backups and restores, the only scalable architecture, and the only solution priced comparable to the cost of a new tape library.