Tape backup is commonly used by businesses and organizations to store and protect large amounts of data. While tape offers reliable and secure long-term storage, many wonder if the costs are prohibitive compared to other backup solutions like cloud storage. In this comprehensive 5000 word guide, we’ll dive into the key factors that contribute to tape backup costs and help you determine if it’s the right choice for your data protection needs.
The Costs of Tape Backup
There are several main components that factor into the overall cost of a tape backup system:
- Tape media costs – The physical tapes used to store data.
- Tape drive costs – The tape drive devices that read/write data to tapes.
- Software costs – Backup software required to manage the tape backup process.
- Maintenance costs – Ongoing costs for support, cleaning, tape replacement.
- Labor costs – Admin time required to manage and monitor the system.
Let’s explore each of these cost areas in more detail:
Tape Media Costs
Tape media represents a significant portion of the ongoing costs of a tape backup system. Major tape formats like LTO tapes can range from $20 – $200+ per tape depending on capacity and quality. Most organizations will require dozens or hundreds of tapes to store their backup data. However, tape prices have been steadily declining over time as capacities increase. Where a 200GB LTO-1 tape cost over $100 in 2006, a 12TB LTO-8 tape now costs around $20. Higher capacity tapes reduce media costs by storing more backup data per tape.
Tape Drive Costs
Tape drives have high upfront costs of anywhere from $1500 to $7000+ for enterprise tape libraries. The initial investment pays off over time since tape drives can last 5-10 years or more amortizing the cost. Using older drives can save on acquisition costs, but may have lower performance or capacity. Like tape media, drive costs have declined substantially as technology has improved. Organizations can further reduce costs by only having 1-2 tape drives for an entire storage environment vs. dedicating drives to individual servers.
Software Costs
Backup software is required to manage the tape backup process including scheduling backups, moving data to tape, maintaining a catalog of what data is stored on which tapes, and performing restores. Backup software often carries a licensing cost that is based on the amount of data, number of servers/workloads, and additional features. Open source backup solutions like Amanda or Bacula help eliminate licensing costs in exchange for requiring more technical expertise.
Maintenance Costs
Routine maintenance is necessary with any backup media to preserve integrity and reliability. Tape maintenance involves cleaning drives periodically, replacing worn out tapes, and potentially retaining spare parts for older tape drives. Maintenance costs may also include vendor support contracts. Proper tape care is essential to avoid data loss and extend the life of tapes. Replacing tapes every 4-5 years helps reduce errors.
Labor Costs
Managing a tape backup environment requires dedicated administrative time for daily/weekly duties like monitoring jobs, managing tapes, troubleshooting issues, performing restores, and maintaining documentation. While automation features of backup software reduce hands-on time, larger tape installations still require time investment to keep things running smoothly. Multi-site environments with remote offices can drive up costs for off-site tape handling.
Comparing Tape Backup Costs
When evaluating the costs of a tape backup system, it helps to break it down across the different components:
| Cost Type | Estimated Cost |
| Tape media (LTO-8) | $20 per tape |
| Tape drive (LTO-8) | $4000 per drive |
| Backup software | $1500 per server |
| Maintenance | 10-20% of hardware/media costs |
| IT administration | $70K average salary |
Media represents the largest ongoing cost, but declining media prices help offset that. Maintenance and IT salary costs add up for larger environments. But over a 10 year lifespan, the TCO (total cost of ownership) of a tape system can be justified compared to the risk of data loss.
Advantages of Tape for Backup Costs
There are some key advantages of using tape backup that can help manage costs:
- Declining media prices – As mentioned, tape media prices continue to drop helping reduce the cost per GB stored.
- High capacities – A single LTO-8 tape holds 12TB, reducing the number of tapes required.
- Long media lifespan – Tape lasts up to 30 years with proper storage, amortizing media costs.
- Reuse of tapes – Tapes can be repeatedly overwritten instead of discarded.
- Compression – Tape drive compression can double effective capacities.
- Encryption – On-tape encryption eliminates the need for costly external encryption appliances.
Leveraging these advantages helps organizations maximize value from their tape investment.
Disadvantages of Tape for Backup Costs
There are also some potential disadvantages when it comes to tape backup costs:
- Drive costs – Tape drives carry large upfront costs and may need periodic replacement.
- IT overhead costs – Ongoing IT labor for management, maintenance, troubleshooting.
- Storage network costs – Fibre channel SAN required for enterprise tape libraries.
- Proprietary formats – Vendor lock-in from formats like LTO, SDLT, etc.
- Slow seek times – Linear access means restoration of single files can be slower than disk.
These factors contribute to the ongoing costs of operating tape backup infrastructure. But for many organizations, the low cost per GB still makes tape very appealing.
Cost Comparison of Tape to Disk & Cloud Backup
Comparing tape costs vs. alternatives like disk and cloud backup can better illustrate the value advantage of tape:
Tape vs. Disk Backup Costs
Using disk as a backup target provides very fast backup and recovery, but at a much higher cost per GB compared to tape. 1TB of disk backup storage costs 5-10x more than 1TB of tape storage. Disk-based solutions like appliances often include costly data deduplication to maximize disk capacity. And replicating backups to a disaster recovery site doubles the storage costs. Tape scales to much larger capacities for less money.
Tape vs. Cloud Backup Costs
Backing up to public cloud storage like Amazon S3 can alleviate some IT overhead vs. tape. But cloud storage costs are still fairly high, often starting at around $.02/GB – $.03/GB. Retrieving large backups for recovery can incur very high egress bandwidth fees. Hybrid approaches maintaining a local tape copy plus cloud copy provide a balance of cost and recovery time.
In most data protection scenarios, tape backup still provides the lowest cost per GB stored compared to disk and cloud options. The highest costs may come from IT overhead for managing the tape infrastructure which requires specialized skillsets.
Factors That Increase Tape Backup Costs
There are a variety of factors that can increase costs for organizations implementing and operating a tape backup environment:
- Frequent upgrades – Replacing tape drives/media on shorter cycles raises costs.
- Smaller capacity tapes – Using lower capacity tapes increases the number required.
- No compression – uncompressed backups waste capacity and require more tapes.
- More backup copies – Making multiple tape copies (ex. grandfather-father-son) multiplies media costs.
- Full backups only – Full backups consume more capacity than incremental/diffs.
- Lack of automation – Manual tape handling processes consume more IT time.
- Complex environments – Large multi-site enterprises require more infrastructure and labor.
Organizations should be mindful of these cost factors and optimize their backup practices to lower expenses wherever possible. IT budgets are always under pressure, so using tape judiciously helps reduce total cost of ownership.
Best Practices for Reducing Tape Backup Costs
There are a number of best practices organizations can follow to lower their overall tape backup costs:
- Use higher capacity tapes – Prioritize latest LTO/enterprise tapes to pack more data per tape.
- Enable compression – Leverage tape drive compression to double effective capacity.
- Deduplicate backups – Reduce duplicate data before writing to tape to minimize media needs.
- Shorten retention periods – Keep less historical backups if permissible to reuse tapes more often.
- Consolidate software – Standardize on a single backup solution vs. multiple tools.
- Automate tape handling – Use barcodes and policies to automate tape rotations/off-site runs.
- Monitor capacity – Get visibility into capacity used vs. available to efficiently provision tapes.
- Buy media in bulk – Take advantage of volume discounts when purchasing multiple tapes.
- Use older hardware – Leverage existing drives/libraries and delay new purchases.
Adopting some combination of these tips will help organizations optimize their tape backup costs and maximize ROI on their data protection investment.
Should You Choose Tape for Backup?
Only your specific organization can determine if tape backup makes financial sense for your requirements and constraints. Tape continues to deliver the lowest backup storage cost, but it requires upfront capital expenses and ongoing IT resources. The highest costs tend to come from IT labor, so organizations need sufficient budget and skills. Also evaluate how recovery time objectives factor in – disk or cloud can restore faster, but cost significantly more. Use this analysis to determine if tape media costs fit within your overall budget.
In many scenarios tape remains the most cost-effective data protection solution compared to other options like disk and cloud backup. But organizations need realistic expectations when implementing tape backup around the IT resources required. With proper planning and management, tape backup can offer very affordable long-term storage for inactive data.
Conclusion
Is tape backup expensive? There are certainly significant costs across media, hardware, software, maintenance and IT labor. But on a per GB basis, tape remains one of the most cost-efficient backup target technologies compared to disk and cloud. Organizations who adopt capacity optimization practices, automate operations, and extend hardware lifecycles can realize very compelling TCO with tape.
While declining media prices help lower costs, tape backup requires skilled personnel for administration and daily maintenance. For some organizations, moving to simpler disk or cloud solutions can alleviate overhead even at higher capacity costs. Every environment has unique needs around backup capacity, RTOs, retention policies and budgets.
With proper planning and right-sizing, tape can deliver an affordable solution for long-term backup data retention. Tape media costs continue to drop helping offset other expenses over time. Each organization should carefully weigh the costs and benefits of tape backup infrastructure against other options to determine the optimal path forward.