Slashdot Mirror
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!!!!
Since prior stories have illuminated optical (laser) retention problems, tape does not seem as outdated as it once was.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.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon filled with backup tapes.
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.
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.
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.
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
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.
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.
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?
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...
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.
Free Online Dark Fantasy RPG - http://www.blackmud.com