The Unsung Savior Of Storage

When talking to VARs about tape storage, the typical response that vendors get is a yawn. "They always want to start by discussing online storage and management software," says Todd Owens, storage channel marketing manager for Hewlett-Packard. That is a situation Owens would like to change. "I am trying to wake up VARs," he said. "I feel they are missing a big opportunity. There is some great technology in the optical disc (CD/DVD/MO) world, but the point we're trying to get across to VARs is that you still need tape."

Owens likes to tell VARs that you can't beat tape for cheap storage. It is critical for businesses to keep multiple copies of their information, and tape provides a historical record of the data. Optical simply does not provide all of the same benefits as tape. There are situations where RAID would not be a solution either. "If a company got hit by a virus four days ago and does not know what data was infected, it may need to roll back the clock several days," he warns. "You can't do that if you only have one copy of your data that you did in a mirror. A virus in volume A will go right to volume B. You didn't do anything by protecting yourself with RAID mirrors."

Optical Should Bridge Online And Tape
Owens considers optical technology a middle ground between traditional online storage and traditional backup. "Leveraging tape and optical technologies is a way for VARs to increase profits," he states. "A lot of vendors who do not have a robust tape portfolio will try to tell customers that mirroring the data is good enough. It's not good enough. If you delete a file and it gets deleted in the mirror, I dare you to get it back. Tape is still the safest way to back up data."

Pete Koliopoulos, director of marketing for automated tape solutions at StorageTek, also believes there is a place for optical technology in storage but that it may not necessarily be in the backup space. He thinks the backup market is still relegated to tape.

"Optical technologies, for some very specific applications, work fine," he said. "Two of the best features that optical brings to storage is its permanence and removability. However, when you look at backup and the issues that customers are facing, the requirements change. Those customers have huge amounts of data that they want to back up relatively quickly and inexpensively. The value proposition for tape in a backup application is much stronger than for optical."

Capitalize On The Missed Opportunities
Koliopoulos believes combining tape and optical technologies presents additional opportunities for VARs. "A VAR that can come in with both tape and optical solutions could get a win on two fronts," he states. "The customer may have a need for optical in certain applications but will also have backup needs that are better suited to tape." This would make the VAR more of a full-service provider, trying to attack as many customer needs as possible. Carrying a tape and an optical line in that scenario would actually make a lot of sense. "There is greater financial gain for the VAR," added Koliopoulos. The customer will then view the VAR as being a much broader service provider, rather than someone selling one solution to fit a specific need."

Perhaps the most important issue for VARs to remember is the difference between backup and archiving. With archiving you're simply moving the data from an existing environment to some other medium, and the data no longer exists where it started. With backup, you are creating an exact replica of the data, so it exists where it started plus you have a copy. That is a point that VARs should understand in order to make additional sales and derive additional profits.