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After 60 Years, Tape Reinserts Itself
Lucas123 writes "While magnetic tape is about as boring as technology gets, it's still the cheapest storage medium and among the fastest in sequential reads and writes. And, with the release of LTO-6 with 8TB cartridges around the corner and the relatively new open linear tape file system (LTFS) being embraced by movie and television markets, tape is taking on a new life. It may even climb out of the dusty archives that cheap disk has relegated it to. 'Over the last two years, disk drives have gotten bigger, they've gone from 1TB to 3TB, but they haven't gotten faster. They're more like tape. Meanwhile, tape is going the other direction, it's getting faster,' said Mark Lemmons, CTO of Thought Equity Motion, a cloud storage service for the motion picture industry."
Once again, Reel-To-Reel computers are no longer anachronistic in 60's Sci-Fi shows.
Sure, it reinserts itself, but when it's finished does it take itself out, flip it to the other side, and then reinsert itself again?
Not to be confused with Moby Grape, though it is from the same era.
I've missed my tape drive! My TR-3 1.6/3.2 circa 1996, was plenty for the hard drives available at time and pretty much a requirement for Windows 95 considering how often it killed itself, but within just a few years the hard drives far exceeded the capacity of tape. Fortunately by then Windows 2000 was out and life has been good since.
I'd love to use tape again, but with 1.5/3.0TB drives selling in the $1,500 range it still doesn't make sense, not when I can buy a dozen 2TB hard drives for the price of one 1.5/3.0TB tape drive
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
I have twenty terabyte backups NIGHTLY. I am required to keep certain tables (files by another name) for seven years but fortunately not all of it has to be online. I have over twenty terabytes I have to have backed up each night and a specific number of these backups available both on and off site. I have copies of quarterly and yearly complete backups I have too keep.
Show me a disk solution that is even remotely affordable. Cheap disk, maybe if you don't have any real amount of data and are not legally bound to keep it.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I used to have a tape deck in my PC 20 years ago for backup, but I always thought the tech pretty much died, but now I'm curious, I have 3TB of storage in my current PC and I haven't quite been able to afford the hard disks to fully backup everything, but if tape is so cheap and fast (for sequential writes anyway, which is all that's important here), is it readily available for home backup use?
heheh, I could start using tar (Tape ARchive) for what it was originally intended for.
Perhaps the medium is, but the related technology that makes the medium useful isn't. The drives can run thousands of dollars, and require specific technologies on the servers. On top of that you need software to run it, AND competent backup admins that can handle it.
Not that disk based solutions are significantly better, but they certainly have the ability to be significantly less complex ( which is always a good thing ).
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Does that mean this stack of cassette tapes is now "in" again? Alright!! "Moving Pictures" on tape FTW!! Where's my WalkMan...?
... is huge! Now even a home user can have a tape robot for back up without worrying to be tied to a specific vendor. Well, maybe... but I can dream :)
Tape storage capacity is great, and the streaming speed is also great. but the seek times are ridiculous. This is why tape is dead to me. If I want to restore a single 1gb file from a 800gb tape.. it could take a very long time. If i want to restore a single 1gb file from a hard disk it is pretty much instantaneous.
Hmmmm, sounds as if you're selling something...
1) Big drives are still random access, tape isn't.
2) Faster moving tape is more prone to catastrophic breakage than slower moving tape. (Although both are way more prone to The Bad Thing (TM) than disk drives are.
3) Azimuth alignment between ostensibly "identical" tape drives -- hilarity ensues.
4) Those who ignore the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them.
Tape never died. It was still used for a lot of large applications.
It's just that for some things, disks got cheap enough and reliable enough to displace tape.
Part of that was the tremendous resources put into disks with the explosion of consumer use.
High capacity tapes were a much smaller market and one that could support high cost. It looks like tape is just catching up.
I for one welcome our huge cheap tape library overlords! ;)
I used to have a tape deck in my PC 20 years ago for backup, but I always thought the tech pretty much died, but now I'm curious, I have 3TB of storage in my current PC and I haven't quite been able to afford the hard disks to fully backup everything, but if tape is so cheap and fast (for sequential writes anyway, which is all that's important here), is it readily available for home backup use?
Yep, price is the key here. I also had a tape drive 20-ish years ago (QIC-30, I think, with 60GB per tape cartridge). Nowadays, I find it hard to beat the external USB disk for backup. Our main server at home has 6TB of disk, and backs itself up regularly onto 3 cheap 2TB USB drives which are attached to it. Since these USB drives cost only a bit over euro100 each, they are duplicated with the other copy cycled out every few weeks. What would be the comparable price for tapes (1 drive, at least 2 copies for backup)?
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
LTO-5 Drives are $2000-$3000. Even though the tapes are comparatively cheap, you're still stuck with rubber bands driving a flywheel turning the spools.
And if you are waiting for cheap Chinese knock-offs... well good luck with that. I'm not convinced that consumer's are going to be that good at keeping the tapes safe, magnetic free and away from the cat/dog/monkey peeing on it.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
An enterprise quality LTO-5 tape drive is $1000, and tapes are $100 each. Compare that to an enterprise disk-to-disk backup solution that is $15000 for the hardware and another $5000 for the software. If you are in a business that is only open 8-5, meaning you have a large window to do backups on nights/weekends, which do you think your boss will make you go with?
Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?
...tape still jams and breaks. Every audio cassette I've ever had has done so. RIP.
Why not make it 100TB? Or 500? Since you can keep wrapping tape around a spindle, lets make it a few hundred petabytes and use it as a spare wheel for the motorbike. Tape serves a purpose for certain jobs, for others it's completely useless. HDDs are far more capable than tape in many ways, but their market is different. Ultimately tape will go the way of the dodo, as will HDDs, and in the meantime we use the best fit for the task at hand, factoring economics into the equation.
Like many articles on slashdot, this one seems to be a mixture of misinformation and flamebait.
About a year ago, staring at never-ending rsyncs between four boxes containing ~12TB of data apiece, I decided that it would be cheaper and easier for me to move to tape rather than continually duplicate data across RAID5 volumes and hope I never have a disk failure and a hard error on any of the remaining drives. I managed to get a Quantum Superloader (LTO4) and a dozen tapes for about $1600. There has been a learning curve with the setup, but there's just no other practical way to deal with tens of terabytes of information.
I was able to move to a single storage machine and switch off a bunch of noisy, hot, power-hungry systems. I was glad to make the switch and I wish I had done it sooner,.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
Does it really have to actually be an infinite tape?!!
What if it's just long enough that it would take the machine the whole lifetime of the universe to read the whole thing?!!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
It looks to me like disk is not that much more expensive than tape. A 1.5TB LTO-5 blank tape is $52.58, or $35/TB. A 4TB USB drive is $229.00, or $57/TB. For backing up 8TB of fileservers at my job, I prefer USB drives. I can just bring them over from the server room and plug them into my laptop if I need to look back in time.
Over the last two years, disk drives have gotten bigger, they've gone from 1TB to 3TB, but they haven't gotten faster.
Technically they get faster every time the density increases, as there is more data passing under the head in a certain time and, it takes less travel to seek over a certain amount of data...
Well, RAIDs of that capacity are certainly not unheard of.
/* No Comment */
they are still hit or miss, I have had tapes become corrupted during the writing process, during a recovery process, and who knows about those tapes that have been stored offsite for 5-10 years. I hope they are recoverable. In any case It much easier for me to write to a NAS or SAN and have it replicated off site, then it is for a sequential tape recovery from an off site location.
Jack Velenti, is that you?
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
--
Ever notice how people remember posters by their sigs and not their names?
I had to laugh at this. Only because I can think of two sigs I see here often "I changed my web server to port 6502, long live CPU wars" and "Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway" but I couldn't tell you their names.
Hard disk prices are up 20% since the Thai Tsunami, SDD prices are coming down, but are still too high for mass adoption. Tapes just seem like a primitive solution, but hard drives aren't really any more amazing, if you think about it. The movement is just hidden, but it's still movement and it's still a bit clunky. We should all just hang our collective head in shame. :)
You know, there's a nasty little secret about tapes.
You are NOT supposed to reuse them. Certainly you aren't going to be encouraged by and of the relevant vendors to treat them as interchangeable with random access media like a hard drive.
So you probably need a LOT more tapes then you seem to be using. That get's expensive quick.
The tech has it's caveats.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Nobody I work with in media production really wants tape to stick around as a day-to-day medium. Even medium-term archival use is a pain.
The issue is that hard drives are a self-contained solution. If you give someone a hard drive, they have all of the data and physical infrastructure needed to access and use the data contained within. The most elusive component is often a spare cable.
If you give someone an HDCam tape, they have to go find an HDCam deck. While a hard drive demands a Firewire or USB port that exists in every edit bay and on every desk in every production company, office and network everywhere, an HDCam tape needs about $80,000 to $100,000 in equipment just to get to what's on that tape. For the final output, you need that $100K deck again.
And it's not even a matter of the outlay for the tape hardware. It's the time it adds to the whole process of working on a project.
While you can go and rent time, it adds a layer of obfuscation and complexity in the process. Instead of rendering-out a project and dumping it onto a hard drive, you've got to actually go somewhere and pay someone to do it for you.
Even if you have a deck, and can use it for free, it's still an extra step on both ends. And you have to stop and think "Will they be able to work with this file? Will I?" A new tape formal will likely present all of these issues. While it's a great idea on paper and in the lab, I don't see it being workable in a functioning production environment aside from long-term archival storage. (i.e: everything more than a few years back)
Tape is a terrible thing to rely on. When you're backing up to a medium that has less reliability than your primary data storage, you have already failed.
Multiple Data Replication + Bit Rot Monitoring is the only thing that serves as a remotely reliable backup solution. Either from good cloud storage (e.g. Amazon S3) or through various more traditional non-cloud solutions (really the preferred option IMHO) from various vendors.
Amazon provides a 99.99999999999% SLA on data integrity for data stored in S3. Tape backup data integrity averages about 60%.
I would never use tape backup in this day and age.
99.99999999999% ? That's 1 millisecond of downtime in 317 years.
When picking numbers out of your ass, please give them a sniff to make sure someone will think there's a kernel or truth in there.
Tape is the most reliable form of backup we have today.
And remember kids: If it's powered on it's a copy, not a backup.
You are NOT supposed to reuse them.
LOLWUT?
You can always judge the level of crazy by the number of unnecessary capitalizations.
Nonsense. Modern tapes are specified with hundreds of thousands of passes and hundreds to thousands of loads/unloads.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
How, exactly, does a tape drive actually save you anything (in terms of time spent backing up, throughput, etc.) with a dataset of 12TB over disk-based? I fail to see how that would be any more favorable.
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Tape has always been a increasingly attractive solution to my backup needs, and certainly better than bdrs. However until I am in a scenario where I need to perform a full restoration from tape I will wait this one out. Backup zpools and simple rsyncs I have done but dealing with all the potential mechanical and electromagnetic mishaps of tapes I have no experience with. I have read some of the main criticisms of that backup media are the failures during the reads and writes.
He mis-remembered his "11 9s" marketing figure and added two more: http://aws.amazon.com/s3/faqs/#How_is_Amazon_S3_designed_to_achieve_99.999999999%_durability
On the "If it's powered on it's a copy, not a backup" mantra: I've heard this for years and I can agree with it, somewhat: catastrophic power failure, corruption, etc. means it can be damaged or altered. The same is for security issues.
However, this is true for on-facility tape backup, or remote tape backup, as well. Except with tape, it's more likely to be a "we lost everything" scenario than "a couple files were corrupt" as it is with a hard drive.
So what if you have A Lot Of Data, and you've got a tape robot? that is, for all intents and purpose, online tape backup. You're not removing or storing the tapes while they're in the robot, which is how they're mostly run until they've gone through the cycle.
For archival, I'd agree with you, however. Offline archive data should certainly be offline.
As someone who's been doing this sysadmin thing for the better part of 12 years now, I'd appreciate anyone who has a good explanation for why an online copy of something is not a 'backup'.
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For those who are not familiar with tape, LTO is the current technology. It is a vendor neutral/open standard, unlike DLT (Compaq), AIT (Sony), DAT (sucked), Mammoth (Exabyte), and others. Basically, it got commoditized after a long long fight to keep prices high and customers locked in to certain vendor technology.
I would really like to hear what people know about this process of standardization with tapes. It took forever for this to happen.
Because every tape and autoloader has been so different, it has been really hard for software vendors to write applications to support this huge number of libraries. Just as an example, Bacula, one of the most popular open-source backup apps out there has no support to eject a tape. I kid you not, if you use Bacula, you gotta bust out the mt eject command after telling Bacula to release the tape.
The great thing about LTO is that they recently added hardware encryption and partitioning in LTO5, along with a density increase. I don't know what the current status on LTO6 is, but I don't expect to see anything for another year or two. LTO5 just came out one year ago.
DLT S4 was keeping the density war up with DLT4 (800GB native), but Quantum killed it back in 2007 and there will not be a DLT S5. Anecdotally, I have a lot of trouble with my at-home DLT S4 drive that I've never seen with LTO3/4 drives. The problem seems to be that some tapes just go bad after awhile and despite Quantum's "lifetime guarantee", they will tell you to go f-- yourself if you try to RMA a two year old tape with four or five writes on it.
The one notable exception to this commoditization is Sun/Oracle's StorageTek T10000 tapes, which are something like 5TB. However, Oracle is not a research company; they will eventually just go LTO too is my guess. They already make LTO stuff.
Personally, I have a Quantium DLT S4 drive for my home backups, along with a small software RAID array that does nightlies. It has the benefit of being able to store everything I've got on a single tape. I use a custom script with GNU tar.
My VCR will pull the cassette back in after only a minute or two, if you eject a tape but don't take it out.
Program Intellivision!
The main advantage for me is the inherent stability of tape medium over hard disks especially as an archival medium. Hard drives always have a chance for failure whenever you plug them in. Tapes are safer in that regard. It's not a significant advantage for home users, but I find it a nice luxury to have duplicate data both in always available medium (RAID6) and in archival medium (LTO3).
LTO-6 is not available yet. When available, each cartridge will hold up to 3.2 TB uncompressed. (I can make up practically any figure I want for compressed data capacity. It just depends on the type of data and the compression algorithm.) That's not bad, but IBM's TS1140 tape drive has been available since June, 2011. It supports tape cartridges that each hold up to 4.0 TB uncompressed. The Oracle StorageTek T10000C tape drive supports cartridges that each hold up to 5 TB uncompressed. It depends on what you're doing -- raw storage capacity per cartridge is certainly not the only relevant specification -- but there are interesting choices.
I can tell you that several major TV show producers are archiving HD shows using LTO-5 with LTFS today, using uncompressed, JPEG 2000 lossless, or JPEG 2000 lossy @ 100 Mbps.
LTFS is the key technology, because TAR was just too annoying to use.
The full size of my backup is currently 33TB. It's almost all video, so there's no deduplication or meaningful compression that can be done. What I had been doing was slicing the storage volumes up so I could have two or three copies of my data. I had four machines and 64 physical drives in a 1000 square foot apartment (and one room that was not less than 90F year round...) devoted to all of this. It didn't make sense to add more, larger consumer drives to the mix - I'd just have to find a place to put them, power them and cool them and to do so within the limitations of the space that I occupy.
Since I have my tape changer, I've been able change my storage strategy to better and more securely accommodate my need to expand my available storage. I still have my data in nice, redundant zpools, but now I don't feel like I need to buy multiple disks for every bit of data I want to store, I have a worthwhile off-site storage option and it's costing me less than adding spinning disks would.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
I've been using LTO for monthly backups since LTO-2 came into fashion and, so long as you have a decent interface and block size, the performance is most impressive. I usually just use tar -b256 to give a 128k block size for decent performance. No zip compression since a single bad bit can render the remainder of the tape useless, and block-based compression algorithms such as bzip2 are too computationally expensive.
One thing I don't like though is the deceptive way they advertise the capacity. Here are the specifications for LTO-6:
- Capacity: Up to 8 TB (assuming a 2.5:1 compression) [so actually 3.2TB]
- Data transfer speed: up to 525 MB/s (assuming a 2.5:1 compression) [so actually up to 210MB/s]
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
That is *not* what you do with a TR3.
You drive it a couple of days, even a week if you're lucky, and then take it back to the mechanic--just like any other Triumph . . .
hawk
Not true. The LTO tape will outlast the heads on most drives. Read the IBM whitepaper on the 3580 drives. http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpapers/pdfs/redp3580.pdf
Also, it seems tapes are always trying to catch-up with improved hard disk technology, but they never do. Sure, 8 terabytes seems good now, so the "next generation" of tapes will be able to backup data from 8 1TB hard disks, which might be OK until about 5 years from now when 8 terabyte hard disks come out. Then all of a sudden a simple RAID-1 array of 8TB disks is as large as your next generation tape used to be, and has the advantage of both random-access and redundancy. So for all your investment in tapes, it turns out it may have been easier to just upgrade your RAID disk arrays with larger disks.
Really, tapes have a niche for storing data that no one will ever need to read once it is written, which is common in industries that have regulations requiring them to store records for a certain period of time before deleting them.
It's almost all video, so there's no deduplication or meaningful compression that can be done.
Incorrect. It all depends on what kind of data duplication is being performed. I've witnessed 30%+ dedup reduction with H264 video using block level dedup.
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For archiving large amounts of data, tape is cheaper and more reliable than hard disks. For storing and accessing small amounts, flash memory is faster than hard disks, about equally reliable, and not too expensive. For the operating system and other day-to-day things, RAM will soon be cheap enough that you can suck in ten gigabytes of data at boot time and run off a RAM disk. In a parallel universe most PCs are sold with a tape drive and perhaps some flash memory, but no hard disk. Hard disks are specialized, expensive bits of hardware used by those who need them and can pay for them. Tape drives are mass-produced and can be made cheaply and reliably.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Ok, so where I work, we have a tape library with robot arm and 5 LTO4 drives. We pay about 25 euros per tape, 800gb uncompressed. And the library itself and the drives are expensive.
My question is, could we have a library with SATA disks instead of tapes? And I don't mean they should be running 100% of the time, only when needed. That way you avoid the huge electricity bills. Also we should be able to duplicate data and store the copy drives in a remote vault. And the drives are not supposed to be in a RAID, just use them as you would tape.
Current harddisk prices are 0,048 euro cent per GB. Comes to 38.4 euros per 800GB.
However:
* Prices of harddisks are currently a little high, will drop rapidly. So it's on par or cheaper then tape
* No need to buy separate drives (currently E1120,- for an LTO4 drive)
* No need to a robot arm in the library which is prone to breakage, just a slot which the SATA connecter clicks into
* Drives are still way faster then tape (LTO4 = 120MB/s, SATA-300 = 300MB/s)
* Sequential access to drives, no need to wind or rewind tape
* You could theoretically hook up a drive straight onto a computer and retrieve your data if you needed to
* You can turn on as many harddisks at the same time as you need, not limited as you would with how many LTO drives you have
I've had storage vendors bluntly tell me not to treat tapes that way. That included LTO. They're better than other forms of tape but not still not something to trifle with.
This notion of tape durability you're advocating would be far more significant technological progress than anything else mentioned in this article.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
It just so happens, that just last night I was looking for Reel to Reel tapes, of a certain album, that was digitally remastered poorly, with audible dropouts in the CD, but since the Reel to Reel was taken directly from the sub-master inmmediately after mastering, it would have been a superior source for this album.. However, I got priced right out.. this field is waay too rich for my blood.. any albums of note seem to be at least 100$ to 300$.. certainly i am NEVER going to be able to afford a beatles reel.. looks to me like , art least online, Reel to reel never left.. And the album i'm looking for.?. There were no copies.. but i'll keep looking.. and better start saving too. ;-(
That... runs counter to my experiments. What backup product were you using to obtain those kinds of results?
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
Except hard drives *are* getting faster because, at a given RPM, transfer speeds are almost exclusively a function of areal density. That's why performance charts closely track capacity, with the notable exception of the 10k RPM drive there at the top which probably still has a high areal density as well. And if you think the seek time of HDDs are high, you don't even want to think about tape. Nothing (new) to see here. Move along.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Backup product? Just DFS/SIS using block level dedup on Windows. Perf was a bit of a dog. I don't believe ZFS has similar ratios for the same data (migrated), but the approach is different.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
That wasn't out of his ass: http://aws.amazon.com/s3/ will tell you, and I quote:
"Designed to provide 99.999999999% durability and 99.99% availability of objects over a given year"
Which basically means, in practical terms, they're allowing for up to 9 hours per year where you can't access the data, but they promise to basically never lose the data. It's not about 1ms in 317 years, it's about how many of your bytes could go corrupt or missing out of the total, in the space of a year.
And I quoted, from his own post, more 9s that that.
1 bit every 11.642 GB? Pretty shitty.
For the same reason RAID/NAS/SAN/DAS is not a backup.