Banks, government, big companies (like multinational ones - Mobil,
Coca-Cola, GMC, Pliva, T-Com, etc)...
And for their volume tape is cost effective. But the person responsible for
backup in a company that size would not be asking questions here.
OK, what's the difference between archiving and backup? Backup is
temporary or?
Backup is short term--its purpose is to get your data back online after a
system failure or loss. In an ideal world it has data up to the minute.
In the real world close of business yesterday is that best that can be done
without a large budget. The only time one would want to restore a backup
older than that would be if the latest backup was corrupted somehow or the
media wad dead.
How so? Look at the capacity of drives, and compare to tapes... One LTO
tape drive (200/400GB) costs around 3000EUR, one LTO 200/400GB tape costs
120EUR... One 200GB drive costs under 100EUR...
Someone is ripping you off, dude. Or else the taxes are structured to favor
disk for some reason. The going price for an LTO 200/400 drive in the US
is $2K, and the tapes are $45 a piece, which means that they cost the same
as 40 gig disks. For small backups the LTO is not cost effective, but a
point is reached where the lower cost of the tapes and the amortized cost
of the drive work out to less than the cost of disks.
Other tape drives (like
SONY AIT,
Is Tandberg finally making DLT? Try Quantum.
) with such capacities (300/600 and 500/1000GB) cost
even more,
SDLT 600 drives go for 50% more than LTO, which is reasonable considering
that they have 50% more capacity. The tapes seem to be going for about
$100US, which is considerably cheaper than 300 gig of disk. So again if
the volume is large enough to allow the cost of the drive to be amortized
then the tape becomes less costly to run.
and tapes are much more expensive... So, how so that those are
used instead of 'cheaper' drives?
Because the drives are not cheaper when the storage volume is above a
certain level. At least not in a free market.
Why produce something so expensive when
you have much cheaper solution... Answer that, please...
Already did.
For low-capacity
tapes, it's OK, they're a cheaper solution for lower capacity backups,
What "lower capacity tapes"?
but
enterprise solutions are enterprise solutions, and there is no room for
games here...
So who was asking for an "enterprise solution"?