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Backup Tapes: Alive And Kicking
yootje writes "The Register runs an article about the future of backup tapes, which looks pretty good. Although some people say backup tapes are dead, tape systems continue to evolve. To prove that, The Register intoduces some new products that are about to come, like the SL8500."
We're still using tape back up, and will continue to do so. It works.
I just inherited aN HP 3000 running MPe/iX, nasty. Went to retrieve some files from tape, both tape drives were shot. Ate the tapes, with years of work. The last other full backup was 9/03... Ouch. Our vendor is coming to fix the drives, but I'm looking elsewhere long term. (Especially killing the HP 3k!)
"The chief enemy of creativity is 'good taste'" -Pablo Picasso
The pundits of backup-to-disk always neglect to mention the fact that though disk costs continue to decrease and storage capacity continues to increase, so do the capacities of tape storage mechanisms. Even at $50 US a tape, they would still have a lower cost-per-gigabyte (or is it now cost-per-terabyte?). Especially with organizations with SANs, backup-to-disk is TOO expensive and too wasteful for prescious SAN resources.
Ditto several places I used to work for had huge automated 30 tape backup systems that would back up the entire server drives every 24 hours. They had to pay a monkey to go in and fill the tape resevoir once in a while when it ran out.
Hold up, wait a minute, let me put some pimpin in it
We have an ADIC Scalar 1000 with 12 tape drives and something like 200 terabytes of storage space. I doubt tapes are going to die any time soon.
A couple of weeks ago I went to a careers conference at which the product manager for HP tape drives (based in HP, Bristol, UK) waxed lyrical about tape drives...it appears that HP are still actively researching tape drives, and have devoted significant resources towards future development.
We use TSM (Tivoli Storage Manager) to backup our systems.
t orage-mgr/
We backup from the systems via gigabit Ethernet, to the TSM server, where the data is stored in a disk pool.
That disk pool gets flushed out to an IBM 3584 tape library. LTO2 tape drives. Great stuff.
TSM then duplicates those LTO2 tapes, and ejects
the copies from the library, for offsite storage.
Tape's going to be here for a LONG, LONG time.
Requisite links:
TSM - http://www-306.ibm.com/software/tivoli/products/s
IBM 3584 -
http://www.storage.ibm.com/tape/lto/index.html
A RAID-5 array with hot spares or a remote backup site is much more reliable and cost-effective.
Hahaha. Yeah. Price out a quality RAID 5 array (i.e. not some little piece of shit you bolted together out of IDE drives and Promise cards.) Something from a major manufacturer, such as an IBM FastT200, will cost you about $50k if you kit it out with 143GB or even 72GB drives.
With tape drives you have to cope with tape standards changing every year.
Where I work, we surplus equipment after 5 years. Our current StorageTek tape silo will be gone before we'd start caring about changing standards. The (12) 9940A and (2) 9940B drives in it are good for 100-200 GB uncompressed. We back up the entire datacenter -- UNIX, VMS, and Windows clients -- and, as long as we keep the scratch pool full, we never run into capacity issues. There is nothing to "cope with", it all Just Works.
Want to read tapes that are more than 5 years old? Not a chance.
Ever hear of backward compatibility? A DLT7000 drive can read any DLT tape you put into it. Same with DDS4, etc. As long as the tapes are stored somewhere safe and climate-controlled (such as, Idono, a datacenter?) you shouldn't ever have a problem reading them. Hell, we still use 5-year-old tape on a daily basis in our smaller IBM silo.
Want to back up anything above 40 GB? You have to buy incredibly expensive DLT instead of DAT, most likely with a robotic tape change mechanism.
Yeah, so?
Costs you about $40000.
You've obviously never priced these things. You need to add a zero. Clearly, data retention and retrieval is not important where you work.
Nice troll, though.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
as of a few years ago, i think ADIC and storagetek both offered VHS as an option in their enterprise libraries. Not sure if they are still offered but.... doing a quick look, it seems like ADIC still offers these and that they hold about 14.5GB each which is VERY low capacity for the size of the cartridge, and you won't be buying the cartridges at Target, so you wont' save money.
Locking them in a fireproof safe does little good with plastic tapes. The Safe may be fireproof but that doesn't mean the heat inside them doesn't go up. Your 80GB tape is going to be a pile of goo, but on the plus side it wont be cinders.
Well, not by much. It's like 10% higher throughput and you can put a full 200GB, uncompressed, on one tape.
And at a price point under 50 cents to the gigabyte. Woooo.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Since there's no real consumer-need, there's no real consumer model and no consumer production. That keeps the production costs up in the realm of the corporate/business users.
Ebay?
> You said it yourself. "Reasonably reliable."
Actually, it is perfectly possible to achieve reliable data transfer (or storage) through an unreliable medium, using error correction codes.
Even with a crappy chewed up tape, it is possible to pefectly recover the data, as long as the data is properly interleaved and a robust error correction code is used.
My rights don't need management.
Absolute nonsense
IBM sell a LTO2 tape drive with autoloader, about $10000, capacity of 200GB uncompressed per tape (400gb with hardware compression), capable of holding 7 tapes, giving 1.5TB of storage for a fraction of the cost of a raid5 array of similar storage capacity and reliability, all in the space of a shoebox.
How much is this remote backup site link going to cost when you're going to copy 400GB of data a day to it? over here in the uk you'd be looking at $100k or more a year if the distance was anything meaningful (more than the length of some ethernet), a smidgen more than the cost of replacement tapes every year.
Then you take 1 tape every week or month and chuck it in a bank vault to provide the ultimate fireproofing.
We do have a remote backup site with a 15 mile fibre connection to it, but its there for speed of recovery, not because of any fantasy concept of it being cheap, it's massively more expensive than any other solution available.
Ewan
most good fireproof "MEDIA" safe boxes are designed with just this in mind. The cheap document safes are not. They are there to prevent temps reaching over 400F as to not have the documents combust at those temps. A media safe will be able to let the internal temp stay at below 90F for approximately 15 to 20 minutes. If the fire is not out by then, you have bigger problems than melted tapes. You also should think about offsite storeage as a secondary measure.
Optical Drives and Hard Drives are Not comparable to systems like these, Just look at the specifications. It is a 300,000 (Yes, Three Hundred THOUSAND) Tape library system. It can hold UP TO 300 Gb per cart. With a total of 90PetaBytes of storage..
Now, Dont get me wrong, Those lovely little DVD burners are cute at 4-8Gb, But are not even a consideration when talking such large amounts of data. Also I would like to see the projected cost's for a system that can do 90Petabytes of storage to HDD, Would be extraordinarily expensive
DSLIP Web Design and Content Management Australia.
I think you've about nailed it. There's one really tough issue though, which you've implicitly touched on:
"c) mechanisms exist for easy and fast off-site archival storage" (emphasis mine).
The biggest and most critical use of tape for many companies (outside of a fairly small window of a few weeks or months), is utter disaster recovery, legal compliance, and intelligence protection. That leads to tapes being kept offsite for a long time (seven years here--probably the same in the USA). Stuffing labelled tapes offsite is easy--stuffing drives offsite is more complex, as they don't have big friendly barcodes on them; nor do they suffer being dropped well.
For short term storage, near-line systems are starting to take over though and I could NOT be happier!!!
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
I work for at an IBM data libary(currently at work actually). We have about 1.2 million tapes we manage(mostly 3480 and 3490). The main thing I notice about them is reliability. I can go get a tape from 1988 and still read it and write to it without problem, which with a cdr or HDD that has been written over many many times is unlikely. The are very tough too, I've dropedd many a stack of tapes and they never break. They are also very cheap, and it is quite easy to get thousands of them used an relabled for much more cheaply than the price of raid-5 arrays and new optical media. We can recover from a complete loss of this facility completely, and have simulated it before. We have nightly offsite backups of thousands of tapes. The hardare surrounding this is very reliable too. Storagetek silos can hold a few terabytes of tapes. These run 24/7 and very rarely do they fail. The drives themselves put at least a hundred tapes through a day, and mabey 3 tapes a day out of 150 drives gets cycling many tapes gets stuck so that it requires human intervention. With new tapes with higher capacities(and backwards compatability) and better automated systems I don't see these going out anytime soon. DVDs and HDDs are simply not rugged and maintenance free to transport many of them daily back and forth, and to use for many years without fail. First post :)
This is turning into a typical /. discussion. Guys who haven't had experience verus those who have. For those who want to use disk backups: Try that when you are backing up 3TB+ a day. It's all a question of scale.
.PSTs are evil) refreshes come along at 18 or 24 month intervals. This coincides nicely with the doubling in capacity that tape drive manufacturers produce.
Tape won't die becuase it's alredy been used for 30+ years and there is a load of data out there that needs to be kept. There is a significant market just keeping this alive. Although the tape manufactureers would love us to do it, it is very rarely viable to pull back and refresh all the media you generate. Net result is that large backup and achival systems, once in are there for keeps. This somewhat explains why initial capital costs are so high, as refreshes for SMEs are rare. In orgs that have rampant out of control data growth ( this is most believe me - sub rant:
The real killer though is not the hardware but the software, keeping old backup systems alive to restore your old media is a nightmare. Anyone tried to restore an Novell system recently?