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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."
I should stop using the tape jukebox system I have on my NetBSD box?
We're still using tape back up, and will continue to do so. It works.
We still use tapes for backup, and have no intention on killing them anytime soon. It's a good system that is proven to work. Companies need more than a well-dressed salesperson to convince us otherwise.
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.
And now the medium is still being used well into 2004 and shows no signs of fading away. That's over 20 years the medium has been around for, relatively unchanged. Geez.
BLING BLING. Meet the architecture that's changing everything.
Until optical media surpasses them in storage capacity, ease of use, and reliability, I don't see tape technology going anywhere. They serve a specific purpose and serve it well.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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.
Since prior stories have illuminated optical (laser) retention problems, tape does not seem as outdated as it once was. Tape's biggest problem now seems mainly cost. I had a 5GB Travan in a system and the per-tape cost was around $40. DVD blanks are around $1 for about the same amount of storage.
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 4TB of SCSI Disks, and removable 250GB firewire drives for backup. Tape has let me down way to many times. Plus, I can restore from a catalog with in seconds. I would love to see tape do that.
I don't think tapes are dead. We have 10 tapes for every server in our company (5 for M-F, 5 for each Saturday of the month). At around 400+ servers, that racks up in numbers pretty quick. Plus, we have to cross ship the tapes to offsite storage every day.
Also, 270 some of our servers are on WAN links, between 56k and 256k circuits. Not exactly speedy when you think of backing up over the network. Also, the bulk of our data is done in our data centers - two of them. We have to have the data offsite. I don't want to try and transfer who knows how many terabytes of data over three T1's every night. We actually have higher data throughput using a courier!
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon filled with backup tapes.
Some of those backup drives can hold up to 90PB of data.. holy crap.. think of what you could do with 90,000,000 GB of space... it hurts to even think about it..
The only thing that hurts worse is trying to find a space to put an 8ft x 30ft x 200ft storage device that weighs 310k pounds (140.9 metric tons(2200lbs))
We still use some 8mm tapes to back up some RS/6000 systems. We use 4mm tapes for the Sun and HP servers.
I would like to migrate everything to one format, but red tape has thus far prevented me from doing anything about it. I have a proposal for converting to sDLT, but corporate policy forbids anyone except the purchasing department from speaking to vendors about pricing, and purchasing won't speak to vendors at all unless they have an authorized capital expense form. I can't build the business case to get a capital expense form until I get pricing information from the vendors. It's a bitter cycle
So, I sincerely hope my 4mm and 8mm jukeboxes stay alive and functional for the forseeable future, since I can't get approval to evergreen those systems with something cheaper and better!
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
A RAID-5 array with hot spares or a remote backup site is much more reliable and cost-effective.
BZZZZZT! I'm sorry, but thank you for playing.
What happens when the CEO deletes his stack of porn off the file server? Your RAID-5 isn't going to help you one damn bit. And maybe your company doesn't have the bandwidth to move the 100+GB of data on the fileserver to an offsite backup.
Backups don't just cover hardware failures. They cover people failures.
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
The Register intoduces some new products that are about to come,[...]
The problem with all of these endless new tape technologies is that after they come they (or their vendors) tend to become lethargic and lose interest in the whole process so that six months later they're trying to sell you yet another replacement technology.
That's fine for something like a computer that can run the same software each generation, but for tape devices the need to change media is like having to re-code your application in a new language every time you upgrade the computer. People don't want to do it.
Most customers want a backup media that will still be viable in at least seven years because of legal requirements. That can mean needing to be able to buy a drive that can read their tapes 5-12 years from now. How many of these new tape technologies will have that kind of staying power?
The standard 9-track 2400 foot open reel tape served the computer industry for about 30 years, providing a standard storage and interchange mechanism for pretty much every computer larger than a PC. The Internet has rendered the need for an interchange mechanism less critical, but the instability in the archival storage formats is now giving people serious headaches.
G.
Only need to backup 160GB (do not forsee that growing in 5 years). Gonna just buy two 160GB IDE HDD's & 2 firewire enclosures.
~$340 for both. Keep one plugged in for daily backup, keep the other in a safe place... swap them every month.
Pretty cheap, plenty fast, and won't take up much space!
I sell servers to small SOHO type businesses, doctors, lawyers, accountants, etc. There is never large amounts of data but it does exceed the CD-ROM limits and DVD are just to unreliable. It is too easy to burn a coaster and they have poor shelf life. And even at 9gb they are often too small to put all the data on one disk.
And getting the office receptionist(often the person who will do the job of managing the media) to swap disks is often asking too much. It has to fit on one tape/disk/whatever or it isn't going to get done.
Tape especially DAT drives give most bang for the buck.
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I always wondered why they don't use off the shelf VHS tapes for data backup. You could probably build an inexpensive, yet reasonably reliable backup unit from the mechanism+record/playback heads of a low end VCR.
My rights don't need management.
I have yet to see these new fangled, so-called 'floppy disks' prove themselves in any sort of meaningful way. I have been using my TRS-80 with it's casset tape storage since 1980, and I have no intention of switching horses in mid-stream!
Harumph!
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
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?"
Stop working for idiots.
It's much less stressful.
Customer: I accidentally modified this file 2 days ago, can I get a backup copy?
You: Sorry, you're screwed.
Me: Yes, I'll have that restored for you as soon as possible. How can I contact you to notify you that it is finished?
We use RAID-5 and tape backup (which is off-site). The RAID covers disk failures; the tape backup covers user screw-ups and disaster recovery. And we've used both frequently enough to make them worth the money.
For one I think CERN expects to generate on the order of 4 petabytes of data per year in a year or two. I think other large particle colliders may generate the same amount of data. Other places that might generate the same amount of that are pharmaceutical and genetics/proteomics/biology related projects.
"When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it
Cheap tape systems are a lifetime of agony. I'd recommend a used DLT drive over a new 8mm/DAT/DDS drive. DLT just *works*. When it needs cleaning, it tells you via a LED, not mysterious backup job failures, etc
Yup. When I can get 10 or 15 2in x 3in sized doo-hickey that can store 80+ gigs at under $20-$30 per doo-hickey, I may change.
you cannot get those features in the Doo-Hickey(tm) line of products. You will need to upgrade to the Widget(tm) line or - in the enterprise arena - to the Super-Widget(tm) family.
We look forward to assisting you with all your thingamabob needs.
Sincerely,
Bob Gadget, Marketing Weenie
Amalgamated Whatzit-Whozit-Howzit Industries
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
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
I dunno about you but my DDS4 DAT system tells me it needs cleaning with an LED, too. DAT works great so long as you respect its limitations: you don't use the same tapes over and over for years; you archive to them for years.
You're living in the past.
A RAID-5 array with hot spares or a remote backup site is much more reliable and cost-effective.
Have you forgotton that some places use tape systems for archival storage as well? I suppose near-line is dead as well. Most of the companies that I have worked at use high-rez artwork. At an advertising agency, you are churning out gigs of files that may be used for 6 months tops, yet in 2 years someone will ask for job # 232343-xxx for god knows what reason. We use a 100 tape library for back ups and archives, and the archive is integrated with the asset management system, so the studio bosses can go to a web page, see that a job has been archived, add it to his cart, and restore it from tape with out much more than punching 2 buttons. They can also archive the inactive jobs by adding them to a archive cart and telling it to 'go'. Even a Terabyte capacity raid fills up pretty quickly when a high resolution art file is 1-2 gigabytes. Having a near line archive that is part of our backup solution is saving us big bux. Don't know what raids you use, but these LSI logic fiber channel raids aren't cheap.
Even the changing formats arent that bad. The jukebox lets us upgrade the 4 drives that it contains. Keep in mind that this is a small scale solution too, Can't imagine keeping a bunch of video data live either.
One last thing that we need to plan for at a real business that relies on the data that it stores is a disaster. Should the server closet all of a sudden fill up with water, smoke, fire, server eating cockroaches, be smashed by terrorist piloted airplanes, etc etc. we always have an offsite backup. Lets see your raid 5 recover from being melted into a blob of metal. Clients ask about these things too, in the review process, and it is important that a client's digital assets that it pays real money for are protected. These things are real, not paranoia. I have walked into a smoking server room a few times...
music lover since 1969
Glad that tapes work for you in Virginia. I live in the tropics where the air is balmy and airconditioning is at a premium. Tape media of any kind rots here. It is nothing to pick up a stored VHS tape and find it coated in a thick frosting of white mold.
This is why I record everything neatly on coconut husks:P
Harpo Tunnel Syndrome--my wrist feels funny.
We want to backup lots of stuff over 40Gb. May I introduce you to my good friend the autoloader?
Moreover, we use good ol' DDS-3 tapes. Cheap, reliable, fixed standards. We can't read anything new, but we don't have to; it's not like tape is supposed to be a portable medium.
As many posters have pointed out, tape Just Works, and it works damn well. Speed is the only issue we have, but we still do full backups of our major servers every night. Frankly, your idea of "a remote backup site" (over Internet? Hah!) would take just as long as tape, or longer.
Another one bites the dust
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?
If nothing else this makes the case for implementing remote backup on a massive scale to the Great Big Tape Drive in the Sky. These Ginormous Silos are great for huge service providers that actually have a need to manage a few PetaBytes but they only make sense if you can connect huge numbers of backup clients to them (via a storage network SAN/NAS with lots of intermedia staging servers of course).
We've used these beasts on site and some of them are so large they need their own fire code certification.
...TAPE is a four letter word.
For home use, get a ancient PC, put a good hard drive in it, install Linux with Bacula (www.bacula.org) & only backup your data (not the entire OS) directly to disk. In the long run you'll be much farther ahead on cost & performance. If you ever have a crash, re-install the OS then restore the data.
I salvaged an 11 year old 486-66DX with 24mb ram. Put a 120GB HD in it, an ethernet card, and installed Debian with Bacula. All together it cost me less than $100 to provide a backup solution for three PCs. Everything is scheduled to backup automatically & I get emails if something doesn't work.
Anyway, that's my $0.02. Businesses obviously have different priorities.
If you don't care about offsite storage then tape backup isn't neccesarily for you, but I can assure you, as a server admin, that there is nothing quite like the feeling of taking your backup tapes home with you every night, knowing that they are safe under your pillow in case of emergency. It gives you a great sense of security and calm.
The 40GB Travans I barely noticed, but we've moved up to 400GB Ultriums, and they are making my pillow quite uncomfortable these days!
Mmmm, Overland Storage Powerloader
...unfortunately no one can be told what The Mat^H^H^HGoatse is...they must experience it for themselves...
FWIW: I was told by someone who should know that the tape manufacturers have set a common goal to keep the cost of data on tape at 1/10 of data on disk.
Anyone else heard this?
Ebay's definitely the way to go. Good tape drives, being corporate-targeted fare, are built to last. And there are plenty of servers that came with a tape drive as a standard component that probably never saw more than a couple of dozen backups in their lifetime. That means a cheap, long-lasting tape drive for you.
To give you an idea, I got a Sony DDS4 (20G/40G tapes) about a year and a half ago for ~$275, IIRC. By looking at it, it was barely used, though eyeballs are admittedly pretty weak instruments here. In any event, it's been running weekly backups with no problems at all - no write errors, doesn't chew up tapes, test restores always work. Good enough deal for me...
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
Bah. We backup our RAID-5, and for good reason. [...] When we got hit by a hacker a few years ago, after we had expelled him from the system we just restored from tape. Show me your RAID-5 doing that.
You're missing the point. Instead of buying a large tape jukebox, buy a SECOND large raid-5 array that is about 5x larger than the first and then write backup images of the first one to the second. Ie weekly full dumps and nightly incrementals - then you can have backups from any time in the last several days, or from each week going back a month or so.
Depending on your mix of restores and the egos of the faculty involved ("Ignore those students and fix MY problem NOW!" - dont get me started about lack of practical computer knowlege some CS professors have) you might be able to more easily find, and more quickly restore your backups from disk images than you might from tape. And you can MUCH more easily verify-after-write your disk images than you can your tape images.
You'll find that a big raid array or two will cost in the same range as a big AIT-3 jukebox in $/TB of storage.
You LOOSE offsite backup though and the ability to buy more media so you can occasionally make long-term archives.
A medium sized RAID-5 Array with a smaller cheaper single-tape drive would address both issues and might cost less. It would also certainly have quicker restores.
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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
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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?