Tape vs Disc - the new battle

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Greg Gawthorpe, technical operations team leader at CMC Markets

CMC Markets was established in 1989 as a foreign exchange market maker, and is now a global leader in online trading. It provides tailored online trading solutions for banks, brokers and financial intermediaries worldwide.

Offering access to over 3,000 instruments across 18 global markets, CMC Markets handles equities, indices, forex, commodities and treasuries, and provides a spread betting service to UK residents.

"I sat down last week with our senior infrastructure guy, and he asked me 'Is it time to move back up totally on to disk?'," says Gawthorpe. "It's a key question. We store eight or nine terabytes of data every time we do a back up, using BakBone software to manage the process, and I wouldn't call us a big organisation. We've got to keep that data safe for seven years."

Although there is now a good cost argument for disk over tape, Gawthorpe says the debate has to extend well beyond simply cost and take in practicality as well. "There's no way one disk is going to hold all that data," he says. "And if you're going to have two locations for disaster recovery purposes, that means you've got to have two lots of machines. It's just not as simple as saying I'll use this disk and replace that tape. They just aren't the same thing."

Each location must be an environment suited to housing a disk array, he says, unlike with tape where the back up location need be no more than a good, clean environment with some dust-free shelving. "Tape just sits there until I need it," he says. "It's not a machine that needs to be looked after, while giving off heat and noise. I've restored data from tape that's been there for over seven years - no problem. It's time consuming, but possible. And you can reuse the media."

Although increasingly perceived as yesterday's technology, tape technology is still developing, he says. "It certainly hasn't stood still, as tape vendors realise they need to keep up. They're not just waiting for the axe. With the huge capacities that today's tape media can hold, that's a lot of disk capacity to buy instead. It's not just about capacities though. With today's tape you can get throughput of 250Mb/sec, which is phenomenal. At the very least, it's similar to what you achieve with disk."

He says he does not anticipate a major rush to replace tape within the next few years. "I've heard rumours that there's a few organisations doing this, but I don't know of any specific examples. I've been in this game a long time, and just don't see this move happening anytime soon."

He sees tape and disk coexisting for a long while yet, with neither able to eclipse the other's key strengths. A more important debate, he says, is arguably the choice of software used to manage the process: "BakBone is the best I've used - easy and intuitive. When I come in it reports a successful back-up process, and that's all I care about."

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