"Tape Is Always Going To Be Important" - Company Operations

Computer Technology Review, Jan, 2000 by Mark Brownstein

Interview with Peter Levine, senior vice president of strategic operations at Veritas Software Corporation

Storage Inc. recently spoke with Peter Levine, senior vice president of strategic worldwide operations at Veritas, to get his view of where storage has been, where it is today, and where it's going.

PETER: I think there's an emotional need to have storage--to have backups done that go to tape. There are a couple of things happening. One is that if the price of online storage was the same as tape storage, there would be no reason to have things go to tape, other than to have one removable copy of your data. I think a lot of the techniques that are employed now, things like incremental backup and smart ways to do backup are aimed at reducing the time it takes to backup. The backup window, if you assume that you have terabytes of data to be backed up, the window is not great enough to back it all up. The second thing that is happening is that the amount of data to be backed up is a huge quantity, requiring lots of tapes and lots of storage.

Veritas uses block level incremental backup. It backs up changes to a file and reduces the time for backups and the space required for the backup. This approach reduces the backup time and the amount of tape storage, and I think that's goodness.

At what point do you do a synthetic recover? The issue is "when do you do that stuff?" You can argue that you can have an offline process to (perform) recovery. It depends on how often you do incremental (backups). I don't know that people do full backups every day. The question is about the pain of management (required) to get back to the day before--you can do point-in-time snapshots. You can go to online and then to offline storage. It's kind of like HSM for this--if it is managed, and if the data is characterized properly, (restoral) will not be a problem.

I think (recovery) is pretty manageable. Give the user the ability to go back to a known point in time, with a high degree of granularity that they never had before.

MARK: What about backup and recovery on the desktop?

PETER: Veritas doesn't play much on the desktop. With the whole SAN infrastructure coming into play, tape drives become another appliance hanging off a SAN. This argues for a tape drive on every desktop, but I don't think that's a model today that any large MIS organization will support. With SANs in play, you have a tape appliance that snaps into a tape environment that calls for disk-to-tape direct backup. The important ingredient of getting that right is that you don't have to go through the server (to do a backup to tape).

Tapes are always going to be important, especially with price differences of tape to disk. The SAN infrastructure will have to be direct disk-to-tape. SAN will be important. Manageabllity will be important; it will be an interesting thing to solve, not unlike what networking had to solve in the mid-to-late 1980s.

MARK: Storage Area Networking will become important, but there are standards and other issues to be considered. Network Attached Storage devices seem to be earning a large market on their own. Where do you see NAS fitting in?

PETER: Increasingly, NAS devices that just plug into a network will be interesting devices to a company with standard disk drives and tape drives in an (office) environment. Veritas is building a software appliance that uses a commodity operating system and Veritas components to enable hardware vendors to build NAS devices using their own hardware. If these devices are intelligent, we can do very nice things with them--sophisticated backup and high availability. This creates a versatility with disk drives that you can't get with drives hanging off a desktop.

We're bullish on NAS. We're bullish on having software that goes with hardware that meets needs either in the OEM or the channel.