Tape Vs Disk

Advanced Vault Disk-to-Disk backup appliance is more reliable, faster, and more secure than tape for backups, storage, and recovery.

Advanced Vault eliminates the administrative hassles and hidden costs of tape-based systems.

Tape backup is a cheap way to archive data. But, as part of a recovery solution, tape backup is slow, cumbersome, labor-intensive, and expensive. It substantially increases the length of time required to restore data and in the worst case scenario, an extended data recovery window could mean the difference between business survival and failure.

Advanced Vault eliminates the following costs associated with tape-based backup and recovery:

Labor Costs associated with Tape Backup Systems

  • Costs of lost productivity due to longer recovery times.
  • General physical tape management, both on-site and off-site.
  • Tape maintenance costs i.e., tape rotation to maintain reliability and shelf-life
  • Verification of data integrity residing on tapes

Data Retrieval Costs

  • Costs associated with the time it takes to retrieve tapes from an off-site storage location.
  • Costs associated with locating files to be restored, including searching through tape catalogues and cumbersome lists.

Media Costs

  • Costs associated with tape media, proportional to the amount of data to be backed up

Hardware Costs

  • Costs of tape drives
  • Maintenance of hardware
  • Cost for hardware upgrades

Software Costs

  • Costs of tape backup software
  • Complex licensing model with expensive agent costs
  • Costs of upgrades
  • Costs of verifying compatibility between the tape backup software and the operating system, and all its future service packs and versions

Service Costs

  • Courier or transportation costs to pickup and deliver tapes between your company and your storage site
  • Tape storage costs in a secure off-site location

Ultimately, the cost of not being able to restore is the highest cost of tape
Storage Magazine also reports that over 34% of companies do not test their backups and of those that tested, 77% found their tape backups failed to restore. In addition, Brian Babineau, analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, writes in Storage Magazine, “it costs approximately $2,000 to $3,000 to restore a backup tape and make it searchable...”

Now, consider the advantages of Disk-to-Disk backup

Reliable medium
Disk is significantly more reliable than tape. The shelf-life of disks is far longer than tape and the data on disks remains readable and recoverable through technology upgrades.  Also, disk-to-disk backup is an automatic process with fewer moving parts, therefore less prone to errors and corruption.

Storage capacity planning
Advanced Vault offers cost effective appliances with abundance of storage capacity to accommodate your data growth needs.

Upgrades and enhancements
Advanced Vault offers support and maintenance plan with unlimited support, software updates. 

Disk-to-Disk backup is significantly faster.
Backup and restore speeds are lightning fast when compared to tape backup. 

Block delta processing
Once your first backup is completed, Advanced Vault solution detects the changes within your files and transmits these block-level changes rather than the entire file. Block-level changes represent a fraction of native data, so your backup window is significantly shorter.

Block transmission
Changed data is transmitted in blocks rather than as whole files. Unintelligible blocks offer much less risk as compared to full data sets found on tape.

End-to-End encryption
The data remains encrypted during all backup and restore transfers and while it is in storage. Only you have access to the decryption key to decipher the encrypted data. AdvancedVault does not have any “back door” access.

Replicated vault
Backups can be replicated to remote vaults located in high-security data centers with safe distances away.