George Henke's post reminded me of one additional reason why many organizations use tapes: it is very easy to physically isolate them from any running programs on a routine basis.
It's rare (getting more common?), but it is possible for software to go "rogue," inadvertantly or intentionally. Let's just consider a human, directly. Any storage that is attached to the computer he has "root" access to he could wipe or, better yet, corrupt, if he wanted to. (Maybe he had a bad day? Or year?) These days wiping all the encryption keys would do nicely, rendering encrypted disk useless -- which is why there's the concept of a "key vault." A set of tapes in a vault is beyond his reach. A physically disconnected disk unit would be beyond his reach too, but to periodically separate your data from all computing devices (and from the few rogue operators), tape is very hard to beat. Maybe somebody has a solution in mind for how you get that near-foolproof vaulting without tape. I'm curious about that. I suppose one way would be to put hard drives in caddies of some kind, load them up, then vault the spindles-with-caddies. But doesn't tape do that well? One analogy is the seed vault that's somewhere in Scandinavia. It's a vault containing samples of the world's most valuable seed crops. The vault is biologically separated from the entire rest of the world, so if there's some new virus or other disease which rapidly wipes out crops, the seed vault stands in reserve. It stores the world's seeds, on tape, so to speak. - - - - - Timothy Sipples Resident Architect (Based in Singapore) STG Value Creation and Complex Deals Team IBM Growth Markets E-Mail: timothy.sipp...@us.ibm.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@bama.ua.edu with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
