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Recent Sales Hint That Tape For Storage Is Far From Dead
hightechchick writes "Staples' business-to-business sales of backup tape for storage are experiencing a bit of a revival. What's next, a return to dumb terminals and mainframes (a la cloud computing)?"
What else is there? It's not like you can back up to a SAN, and then stick the SAN in a courier bag and send it to remote storage. Optical? Too small. The magical "cloud" doesn't stack up well for security compared to a physical safe. Flash is promising, but still not there in terms of reliablity.
When they come up with a compact, reliable, portable storage medium I'll be the first one to toss tapes out the window. The idea of running backups to some credit-card sized SD cards is appealing.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Although disk is compellingly cheap, if you want reliable, multiple, and offside-stored backups, tape really is the answer.
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...of duct tape. One can always find a good place for some.
No idea why.
I'll tell you whats next...
A device that lets you type up a word document and it prints it out real time. Essentially it prints your keystrokes as soon as you press them. I also foresee it having an extremely long battery life.
I'm guessing this story was posted by someone with absolutely no experience with enterprise-level businesses.
I'm an iSeries Systems Admin you insensitive clod!
Here is the real link that is missing from the summary.
I always wonder about tape backup.....it seems everyone I know who uses it has had it fail. Hard drives fail too, it's true, but the anecdotal evidence I have says if you are using tape backup, you better have multiple backups.
Qxe4
Did it ever go away? As far as I knew it was always how you did long term backup. We just bought a new tape unit here since we needed more backup storage, and the development of new LTO formats continues apace. Disks are what you use for online storage, and for online backups, you have redundant disks. That is for sure our first line of defense. We have a RAID-6 system with hot spares. Ok, but what about if something bigger happens? I'm not just talking about facilities destruction, what happens if something goes apeshit in the storage system and screws up all the data (or maybe a malicious admin does)? If our backup is just a realtime hookup to another online system, we are screwed.
Tapes though, the protect for a lot of things. We take regular backups, in rotation, so that even if the online system is messed up, there are backups to go to. Those backups can also easily be rotated to secure storage facilities. These are places that aren't easy to have an online system, even if you wanted. You are talking like a vault or something to keep it safe even in extreme situations.
They are also great if we want to keep data for a long time. Tapes have good shelf life. Better than a HDD. This is largely because they are simpler. They are just, well, tapes. Retension them once a year, they can last decades.
So I wasn't aware tapes had gone anywhere. We sure don't use them on individual machines, or use them as fast backups, but they are wonderful as an emergency backup. The protect against a number of issues that an online disk system can't. They can also easily give you the benefit of offsite backups for a much lesser cost. Costs a lot more to get a second high end storage system and house it in another building with fibre than to just walk some tapes over to a vault.
The business I work for goes through tapes like they're used to make coffee. Primary use: legal escrow of source code.
Tape is vastly superior in price/performance* for archival and offsite backup of data. To anything. Maybe someday that'll change, but not soon.
[*: LTO-5 holds 1.6TB uncompressed for 15-30 years in a $100 cartridge the approximate size and weight of a paperback book**.]
[**: Okay, the weight of a Steven King paperback. Still.]
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
Businesses aren't even upgrading from XP or IE 6 on relatively cheap desktop PCs that are probably be cycled through anyway because what they have simply "works", and you expect them to do differently with servers? For that matter there are probably plenty of dumb terminals and main frames still out there being used rather than a 'return'. We just got rid of the last of our dumb terminals a three years ago. The system we had worked. Buying a replacement was a multi-million dollar project that involved racks of new servers, more permanent FTE positions to manage it, and doubling the number of desktop computers to use it. For that matter, it also used tapes for backup. I'm sure there are thousands of old systems out there that still use tape that even though they may not be the newest equipment out there, there is still no business reason to upgrade them. To get our system upgraded, it was a two year sales pitch that had to be supported by a good show of ROI, and then another year project lead time before the vendor could do it. Actually, one of the reasons businesses aren't upgrading from IE6 and WinXp is probably because the servers have to be upgraded first.
gotta think somebody is working on this
once economies of scale kick in, could it give tape a run for its money?
just askin?
But nobody deserves a beating. Chill out.
Facts have a liberal bias.
i could find a tape system that was sanely priced for home use.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Stories like this help convince me that the submitter and timothy have never worked in a medium or large enterprise environment. Anyone who has knows the value of backup tapes.
No, they never went away. Yes, they will be with us for a long time to come.
To anyone who has ever had to manage or deal with a large data archiving or backup system, tapes have always been a consideration. Even if they didn't end up using tapes, they were seriously considered. Very few other options offer the raw storage space, reliability, speed, modularity, and low degradation rates of tapes.
What's next, a return to dumb terminals and mainframes
Hey, smart-ass, maybe people are using what works for them, rather than being told what to do by some pseudo-adult wearing a Darth Vader helmet with a penguin sticker on it.
So says Hilda at the "Institute for Backup Trauma": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgxgYL5P4z4
And yes - that's "Worf"...
LOL!
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. —Tanenbaum, Andrew S.
Wikipedia also mentions that "the original version of this quotation came much earlier; the very first problem in Tanenbaum's 1981 textbook Computer Networks asks the student to calculate the throughput of a St. Bernard carrying floppy disks (which are said to hold 250 kilobytes of data)." --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet
At my school, the campus bookstore actually does use dumb terminals. All other administration computers have an emulator program.
I do not have a sig. You are hallucinating.
I work in television production, and we can't get insurance for a program unless we are backing up all our raw footage, show elements, and finished shows to DLT or LTO tapes. It's a hard and fast requirement, and not even the world's fanciest RAID with extra off-site cloud backup will make the underwriters happy.
This is why us geeks on the 'working end' of the spectrum hate dealing with the sheltered back-end IT geeks.
Yes, we use tape. It's portable, easy to swap, easy to use, cheap to replace when it wears out, etc.
I do have cases where backups are made to disk or over network--then those backups go to tape so they can be rotated offsite.
The one case where I'm stuck dealing with backups to a portable HD between Windows, VMware and the backup software in question the whole setup is so badly broken that the entire thing has to be rebooted in order to swap the USB hard drive to rotate it offsite.
The people responsible for making comments like 'tape is dead' need to be dragged (probably kicking and screaming) into the real world for a while and learn what all their toys are really used for. A server handed to us with a fresh OS is just a doorstop until we actually get applications on it and it is actually capable of *doing something*.
Okay, done ranting for the day...
Amazon recommends Fed-Ex for AWS -- http://newsletters.networkworld.com/t/4725748/258645701/111837/0/. They want the whole fucking storage unit, up to 50 pounds, and will return anything less.
How many of you l337 enterprise sys admins are buying your tapes from staples anyway?
Or did you miss the point?
Depending on how much data needs to be backed up, you could get away with just transporting HDD offsite, perhaps mirrored or RAIDZed. No need to have a separate server, and the offline nature of it means that if you are hacked then your backup is safer than it otherwise would be. As you say, the snapshots will take care of data that is deleted and needs to be recovered down the road, and the checksums will ensure the any silent data corruption will be known about, and if you have redundancy, corrected.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
LTO4 tapes... Cost around $30 each for .8-1.6TB depending on your data. They are cheaper than "a Fry's disk" - they cost at most 1/3 the price of really cheap disk. If you have the infrastructure, they can even be encrypted. Tape wears better when being driven around. Costs 15% or 1/7 as much, roughly, as a disk to disk solution. Admittedly tapes do take up more personnel time, however.
For everyone who says backup to disk, I say it is great if you have the money. If I need to keep one full backup per week for 1 month, and one full backup per month for 1 year, I have about 16 copies. Doing this to disk requires, typically, for data I deal with, at least 2 disks for backup for each original disk of data. Often it might be more. Then, to do it right, you need to put another copy in another location - so to be generous, you now have 4 disks in addition to the original one. Enterprise storage costs around 10x a cheap disk, meaning the disk solution, with 4 extra disks per disk of data, is 4x10=40 units vs a tape is 1/3 the cost of cheap disk... 16/3=6 ... 40/6=6.666666 times as expensive - 1/6.66666 = .15 meaning tape costs 15% the cost of disk.
you don't need tape if you can mirror your san to a few different remote colos. Yeah it's expensive, but it proves the point. Tape give you redundancy + offsite storage + acceptable reliability + decent price point. You can't get those four things with anything else these days.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
And they laughed when Sun bought StorageTek!
Well... Ok... That didn't work out so well...
Yeah, I get that everyone's drinking the LTO kool-aid, but as a boot-strapper I never saw the appeal of tapes. I've been a fan of big dumb hard disk arrays since the day I scored four 40gb drives on eBay at $300 apiece, strapped them into a frankenputer with a hardmodded Promise fakeraid controller, and watched my transfer rates shoot for the sky (and my failure rate : bad Maxtor!).
I spend most of my days dreaming up ways to cram more terabytes per rack, more gigabytes per second. A tape system would take up more space than the hard disk system it is backing up. Sure, it's portable in the sense that you can toss 100 tapes into several rubbermaid bins and tow them away to a serene place, but you could do the exact same thing with another disk array. If you rig your nodes with a fast interconnect like 10gbe or Infiniband, you can easily outpace a tape system by an order of magnitude.
If you think the extra capital investment of a disk-to-disk system is excessive, I see two possibilities: either you don't value your time, or you don't value your data. Me, I have a freakin' Infiniband port on my desktop machine! It gets backed up to the 32TB Linux-based file server, then the extra-important bits are rsynced to another box offsite. Cheap, fast, lazy-sysadmin-proof (that's me). Who needs a tape monkey when a 40-line shell script can do it better ?
-Billco, Fnarg.com
It's only just hit the mass market so the costs for media are high. Try using LTO4 as a comparison instead.
Also FYI "$thousands" is AU $3,775 + tax for an IBM brand LTO5 and slightly less again for a 24 Tape autoloader (holds 36TB uncompressed!).
While USB drives do replace tape in many situations it's often a lot faster (many USB drives are slow) and is a huge amount more reliable to use tape. For example every year I get a few 9 track tapes from the 1980s transcibed and so far they've come back complete.
Consider trying to do that with current hard drives in 2040, I doubt they'll even spin up.
IBM recently announced LTFS (Long Term File System), which allows one to operate LTO-5 tapes as if they were a normal file system.
That's a very exciting technology which allows for the standardization of tape formats -- its specs are freely available in the LTO Consortium website and the implementation has been released under the GNU LGPL (see the LTFS website for links).
Tapes are not dead, certainly!
Back in the not-too-distant past when I worked on tape R&D at IBM, we were entertained by these non-stories. At the time, IBM made more money off of tape than the whole disk industry made all together.
As to the geek-factor, it's worth noting that the slower product cycle for tape development (driven largely by interoperability being maintained for a long time) means that a tape developer can have a lot more fun than a disk developer. When we were inventing the LTO technologies, there was huge freedom to create something new and interesting compared with the difficulty of making even modest changes to the disk product line.
One thing that is generally underdone in our industry is proper labeling of the backup media. You NEED: software that wrote the backup including version Date Tape number in the sequence for this backup (tape 1 of x) hopefully a brief description of what was backed up. In 8 years 10,000 tapes in archive boxes with nothing but barcodes is pretty useless. The catalogues no longer exist.
For *real* archiving, you cannot beat paper tape. I don't trust it unless I can see the holes.
Or organization uses Disk to Disk backups. Meaning we backup our SAN to a secondary SAN, then that secondary SAN replicates to an offsite SAN. So we end up with 3 copies of our data.
The problem with Disk to Disk vs Tape: One day someone who didn't understand LUNS mounted the same LUN onto multiple servers and the two servers managed to clobber a bunch of the backups on the secondary SAN. Its harder to do that with tape....but tape has it's own issues.
My recommendation? Disk to Disk to Tape. Use the backups you store on your disks to do your quick restores and use tapes as your off-site backup. It is probably the most cost effective solution, and since the tapes are not plugged into anything no one can touch your server and instantly wipe out ALL of your backups.
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So punched tape still sells?
Please think of the trees. And the poor woodpeckers that punch the sync holes.
Have you ever considered that other people have other requirements for backups?
There is a world of difference between "oops, I borked a file, let's copy it back from my usb disk" and "This data still needs to be available in ten years, for regulatory purposes".
At home, yes, you are very much correct for suggesting a couple of USB hubs and disks. But for business use, you are so utterly, utterly wrong it really isn't funny.
You know the old mantra "RAID is not a backup"? Well, here is another: "Online disk backup is not an archive".
Last time I checked the specs most hard drives can take a couple of hundred Gs when operating and maybe 1000G when parked (1000G means the metal case would probably break before you lose data).
Many laptop drives even have built-in accelerometers and park the heads automatically when they sense a sudden movement
No sig today...
No tape backup means no backup in my book.
POKE 36879,8
OK, you've missed a lot of points, but the major one is drives are not built to last a long time unused and tapes are. For one thing the lubricants used in the drives break down with time while tapes are much simpler things that do not require lubricants designed to cope with long periods of high speeds in the first place.
That 24 year old drive is not likely to spin up, while today somewhere around the world somebody is reading in a 30 year old tape with no dramas. It's different tools designed for different jobs.
As for RAID vs single tape I was really talking about a single dataset which you would still need multiple disks to contain sensibly with decades of live storage - I was trying to show how it is using the wrong tool for the job. Several tapes are of course more realistic since the expensive bit is the drive and not the tapes.
The way I see it live storage is convenient but prone to change or erasure when you don't want it, and is realisiticly a lot more expensive than a pile of tapes in boxes that require no maintainance and no more electricity than what it takes to keep them cool and dry. It should be obvious but people are going in weird directions in some sort of "one true storage" kick so some sanity needs to be restored.
If you can't afford the drives you just have to make do with solutions that just are not as good at large scales - but at small scales it may not matter. A couple of 1TB drives in USB cases holding two independant copies could be trusted for a few years but as scale, time and transport conditions increase what looks good at the low end looks expensive and risky at the high end.
There is a point beyond which tape makes sense, while of course below that all the kids laugh at the silly old tape users and point to the cheap cost of hard drives with a one year warranty.
I think that given the current economic battles that trouble IT departments, disc based NAS has taken a short-term backseat til budgets recover. I mean sure they're getting cheaper (a buffalo tera station with 2.5Tb and RAID5 is around 300 bucks), but companies are still tightening the belts and since IT is kinda invisible to management, we're the last to get the budget for stuff that isn't broken.
The tape drives do error detection and recovery on the fly.
The tape drives use a strong error correction algorithm that makes data recovery possible when lost data is within one track. When data is written to the tape it is verified by reading it back using the read heads that are positioned just 'behind' the write heads. This allows the drive to write a second copy of any data that fails the verify without the help of the host system.
Use can use TSM/Amanda to allow one or more backup servers to backup multiple servers over the network.
You can also use fibre channel with tape drives and dynamically attach them to servers that need higher speed backups than the network allows and have the tape drives managed by a backup server.
You can even write to two tapes simultaneously, so that you have both an onsite and offsite copy.
When the nightly backups are done you can eject the tapes from the library to go offsite and refill it with new scratch tapes.
Having an offsite copy of your backups is sometimes required by legal or contractual agreements.
For disk storage you usually have redundancy of disks and adapters to decrease the chances of the server going down. Would you do the same for your backup disks? Four TB to store one?
And if you decide to double your disk requirements so that you have ONE backup copy, then you probably will double the number of SAN switches, and SAN switches are not cheap. What if you needed 30 days worth of backups.
Don't look out from under your rock, do you, Timothy?
Lessee, was it Amazon I interviewed with about five years ago, who told me they had over half a *million* servers?
Meanwhile, around ten years ago, an engineer at IBM maxed out a serious mainframe, using VM (their VM, which has been around for over 30 years) with over 48,000 vm's running Linux. The machine was quite happy, the report said, with "only" 32,000 instances of Linux.
One machine.
Every ten years or so: report 1: Mainframe declared dead!!!; report 2: IBM selling more mainframes than ever.
mark
Well, to me it has mattered a bit over a dozen times to recover tapes from the 1980s which is why I put it as an example, so it does matter in some industries (eg. geophysics, legal records etc etc). Imagine having to maintain live storage for stuff for thirty years when you only want a fraction of a percent of it later but you'll never know which bit when you start - it would be an enormous cost once you get away from a trivial amount of data. I don't want to even attempt to imagine what 3TB of live storage would have cost in 1989 because that's how much I have on tape from that era - all theoretically a third copy but in practice I have needed to use some of those tapes on a dozen occasions. I'll let you think about it since you have the silly idea, work out for me how much it will cost to have continually updated live storage of 3TB from 1989 to the present on RAID disks still under warranty. Now do you get what I'm talking about and see why it is a silly idea?
I hate to use "in the real world" even if I mean a mine site, ship, oil refinery etc because to somebody that has been in a war zone I'd still sound like a trivial snotty nosed little geek trying to be pompous.
Also nice choice of an extreme example with zero budget to try to prove an entire field invalid, but not a paticularly mature way to discuss things. I've never touched AIT and it seems to be pretty rare so I can't comment on that, the only reputedly dodgy tape format I've been near is some of the 4mm stuff like DDS, but I've been fairly lucky even with that.
Sexconker:
Please keep yelling and ranting. While others may find it rude and upsetting, I'm saying "Good lord, I've been an idiot!"
I'm atheist, but I'll take good advice anywhere I can find it.
Preach on bro, your time isn't wasted, you've led at least one wandering fool (me) closer to the light.
Thank you.
********* sig: If you don't like the law, get filthy stinking rich, and buy a better one.
A live copy is NOT a backup. File system snapshots on a remote server are very nice and are backups but you can quickly hit a point where you have to discard things that may be important - which is where just dumping that stuff to tape and putting it in a box is useful. My site disaster recovery plan assumes no network connection to the outside world - tape or shipping in a complete spare box gets around that. Tape is cheaper, though both options to fall back on is nice in some circumstances you just can't trust that live copy.
IMHO it's not a real backup unless you can be damn sure that it is all the files from a specific time and not containing any of the changes that made you go scurrying off for a backup in the first place. Snapshots get halfway there but can still be altered on occasion. A powered off hard drive in a box does that completely but it gets uneconomic compared with tape as the amount of data stored increases - plus they are comparatively fragile.
The stuff about long archives was really to demonstrate clearly that tape has a place to those people commenting on this article that thing disk should be the only form of storage. I can't see that changing just yet and really gave the examples of old tapes as something to extrapolate from - if 9 tracks can still be that reliable now you can bet that current LTO4 will be better in a few decades time.
The enormous cost of using disk to archive is still there in current terms. The small company I work for may have had 3TB of data to store in 1989 but now a single survey can be bigger that that so that could be another 15TB per year of unique uncompressable data to archive which just might be handy in 25 years if the client has lost their copy - a bloody expensive way to keep stuff that may never be used so tape still wins.
The "still under warranty" comment was really just to point out that to be reliable you really need to update your spinning storage every five years or so and not just hope that a pile of disks from 1989 will survive to 2010. I'm also aware that vital stuff on tape should get shifted to a format that current drives sold new can read, but that just changes the comparison from an astronomical difference to a large one.
Anyway, my point is tapes have a place. Typically that place is in a different building with enough for a bare metal restore on it, or clearly an unaltered copy of mailboxes from 2009 good enough to be presented to a court.