A colleague sent me the following link the other day: The Case Against Tape Backup. The link gets you to a white paper written by Double Take Software, which argues that using tape for remote office backup is a bad idea.
Their conclusion? That instead of tape, we should employ CDP software, and that this is much more cost effective.
Unfortunately the paper is deeply flawed. Don't get me wrong, I would be very happy if the general conclusions they drew were true. I would be just as happy if they were content to conclude only that tape was bad--meaning too expensive and too unreliable.
However, they are not content to reach such a conclusion, and in their attempt to make the leap from "tape is bad" to "CDP is good" they go dramatically awry in two respects. First, they posit a false dichotomy. It is not like the only alternative to tape is CDP for remote backup. And, in fact, some of the solutions that they (conveniently) ignore, are substantially less expensive than their proposed CDP solution. Second, their financial reasoning is pretty badly flawed. And I have never been a fan of make your own solution look good by falsely making the alternative solution look bad.
However, I do think that following through the line of reasoning in the white paper is pretty interesting--and by doing so we can expose some better data about the costs of remote office backup and the alternatives to tape.