In a recently published survey commissioned by IT Jungle, 54% of the IBM i installed base was found to be still using tape as part of their overall backup and recovery strategy. The origins of tape storage date back to 1928, so why do businesses still use this form of technology for their IBM i environment, when physical tape use is nearly non-existent in Intel based environments?
We’ve compared two very different Virtual Tape Library solutions – find out which is right for you.
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One of the historic reasons is that physical tape was seen as cost effective when compared to virtual tape solutions in the marketplace. While that has been true in the past that is no longer the case.
First let’s look into the true cost of physical tape media. In addition to the tape media itself there is the additional cost of moving tape media offsite (air-gapping) directly or through a third party. Beyond the financial cost of removing physical tapes offsite there is the security risk that your tape media might get misplaced while offsite. There is also the opportunity cost of internal staff having to change tapes and perform checks on data integrity on a regular basis.
As mentioned before the cost of virtual tape libraries (VTL) has been relatively expensive in the past, but now there are two solutions we would like to make you aware of for businesses of all sizes .
The first virtual tape offering is Falconstor, an enterprise solution officially endorsed by IBM, the DSI VTL has been thoroughly tested by IBM.
Quadstor is the second option available to IBM i users. This is an open source solution and is therefore significantly cheaper than DSI. The trade off however is that there is limited support for the solution and it is not officially endorsed by IBM. Below we review the two solutions in more detail.