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I'm doing some market research on a new archive service that replaces tape backup and I'm looking for people that would be kind enough to help me by answering a few questions and giving me some feedback.
HI Michael,
I see companies with much greater than 10TB not only on tape backup but also used within the context of active applications where the data is needed and available for recall and presentment back to either originating applications or most often general search and retrieval applications. Just in the context of email, consider that a 75,000 person company would generate about 200TB over the course of one year in their total email sent and received. They are probably clustering servers for HA and have remote data centers as well, and backups are occuring at either a replicated or synchronized copy at their DR site. If they Journal every message so they can either archive or backup and synch their tape rotation with their shotest retention period for email, let's say three years, they are well into the 1/2 a petabyte on tape and probably disk as well.
An even older and probably the more in use function for tape today is in banking for check images, consider the top 5 largest banks in the US, each of them having over 200,000 depositors with checking accounts, and a picture of every check ever written since 1998 is stored, on tape. And when you request a check from the bank, some of it is online and accessible from general search and retrieval applications, other tapes are stored on shelves. These are the ones that will cost you to retrieve. And it get's better, in 1998 when they wrote these images to tape, they didn't think through how to purge them in 2008. Destroying the media only works if you put everything that had to be deleted at the same time on the same tape, and in today's world you have to ensure that nothing you delete is related to anything that is being litigated, and with all of the litigation going on today, that's nearly impossible, especially since ten years ago no one was planning for these things. So it will stay on tape for a long time, probably migrated back to disk as the media starts to degrade.
So, a handful of banks have plenty more than 10TB, its in the petabytes.
Drop me any questions, would be glad to help.
Good Luck,
Peter
November 2008