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Hard Drives Instead of Tapes?
An anonymous reader writes "Tom's Hardware News weekly news letter has a very interesting article about Dr. Koch of Computertechnik AG who won the contract to build a RAID backup system for the University of Tübingen. Dr. Koch took several standard entry-level servers, such as the dual-Athlon MP, and add modern components and three large-caliber IDE-RAID controllers per computer, and a total of 576 x 160GB Drives."
There has to be a better way than relying on anything stored in magnetic format, optical I think woudl be preferable, and resistant to EMP.
One thing about tape systems that I didn't see mentioned was the portability of the media. Data recovery is still impossible if your backup burns up along with your server. I don't see anyone rolling one of these out to the offsite storage.
Maybe you could do it with a big pipe between your backup location and your servers. But I bet that would cost a bundle in bandwidth.
Also did anyone notice that typo on UPS (maybe they were on drugs USP)! It took me a good minute to catch it.
"I'm just here to regulate funkyness." - James Gandolfini, as Winston in The Mexican
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I looked at doing something similar (but on a smaller scale) for my home.. but the amount of power that a hard drive based storage system takes is amazing. In additional IDE hard drives arn't know for their reliability.. :P (I've had numerous IDE raids fail spectacularly to the point I won't do that again...)
I ended up going on ebay and getting a StorageTek 9714 "Media Library" with 2 DLT 4000 drives in it. It takes a maximum of 2A of power.. (I've measured it much lower then that when the tape drives arn't in use..) This sucker will store up to 2.4 TB ( 1.2 TB uncompressed) in the 60 available tape slots..
The electricity saves more then makes up for the cost of the tapes.. (Also I expect the tapes to last approx 5-10 years.. I wouldn't expect that with the hard drives.)
--Mark
Oh PLEASE! I worked for, what was at the time, the 17th largest CC processor in the nation. Not so big, but lots of merchants. They bought a front-end (where your credit card terminals dial into), and built a backend settlement (so they didn't need FDR - who recently ROYALLY hosed everyone with a software update, including CHASE themselves. No, this software update was completely seperate from the SQL Slammer worm that took them down when it appeared.).
Complaince, usually done by the OTS (Office of Thrift Supervision), is NOT ISO 9000 type stuff. Financial companies are CHEAP. Never forget that. Whatever is the cheapest solution, is the one that is used.
As for tape backups - as an example: It took quite a bit of convincing to upgrade from the 4 drives that took two days to backup the whole network to a single Sont DLT drive. (Because $70/tape is a LOT of money)
There were no 'compliance' worries at all.
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
No, you have $150 tapes that hold 1 TB of IT data. They can be written to at 60MB/s. Tape is compact, requrires no power, it is light, transportable and sturdy. The only major drawback as a backup method is the cost of the drives. (Which gets paid off quickly.)
To backup a storage pool with under a couple of TB of storage, tape is indeed stupid. If what you need is truly massive amounts of storage that does not need to be accessed instantaneously, tape cannot be beat.
cdr/dvdr uses a chemical substration process to have data written to it, and is nowhere near as stable as magnetic tape.
Why do people in industries with strict uptime or reliability requirements always act holier-than-thou about the whole issue, as if their way is the only right way?
Not all companies need five 9's. Not all companies lose much money if data or systems are not available for a short time. In fact, I'd say it's the majority of companies that fall into that category.
Extreme reliability and availability are extremely expensive. For most companies, it's not worth it.
I agree with you, Large ATA RAID probably isn't for your industry, it's not right for everyone. It does work fine for lots of people though. I expect to see it cover much of the 5TB range of near-line backups in the next few years.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.