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Is LTO Tape On Its Way Out?
storagedude writes: With LTO media sales down by 50% in the last six years, is the end near for tape? With such a large installed base, it may not be imminent, but the time is coming when vendors will find it increasingly difficult to justify continued investment in tape technology, writes Henry Newman at Enterprise Storage Forum.
"If multiple vendors invest in a technology, it has a good chance of winning over the long haul," writes Newman, a long-time proponent of tape technology. "If multiple vendors have a technology they're not investing in, it will eventually lose over time. Of course, over time market requirements can change. It is these interactions that I fear that are playing out in the tape market."
"If multiple vendors invest in a technology, it has a good chance of winning over the long haul," writes Newman, a long-time proponent of tape technology. "If multiple vendors have a technology they're not investing in, it will eventually lose over time. Of course, over time market requirements can change. It is these interactions that I fear that are playing out in the tape market."
I disagree.
We used to use LTO, and it was OK for a while, but we switched to using removable hard drives and rsync a long time ago and haven't regretted it one bit.
We're every bit as paranoid as the next guy (there *might* be some more paranoid, but not many).
We've pulled 10 year old hard drives off the shelf before and recovered things no problem. Our rotation won't ever require us to actually do that, but we have tested it a number of times and things worked great.
What we do though, is periodically update our archived copies to newer media when we update our removable drives.. Often times, this allows us to merge old archive media onto fewer drives saving us a lot of space in the long run. We do have multiple copies, including 3 sets that are permanently online in different locations, and a number of offline sets.. As our backups age, we reduce the number of copies we keep offline, but never go below 3 offline copies of any given data.
The real reason that this is fantastic though, isn't that it backs up so much faster (it does, because after a drive has rsync'd once, there usually aren't many changed files compared to the bulk of the rest of the data). The real reason that this is fantastic isn't because we save space and reduce our need to have old hardware with SCSI interfaces etc (it does though). The real reason this is fantastic isn't because when you take older/smaller drives out of the loop, you can actually repurpose them (you can though.. what are you going to do with a bunch of left-over too small LTO tapes).
The real reason that this is fantastic, is that in the event of a catastrophe, you can get things up and running very quickly. If you're really in a panic, you can boot off of the drive that is that backup disk because we add an OS to them when we prep the drives. You just need any old POS PC with SATA on it and a copy of the file used for decryption, and you can be up and running in minutes. Even for the lighter weight emergencies random access to your data is still quite priceless. You can go directly to the file you need, or even multiple versions of it, instead of waiting for tape media to scan.
In short, yes. LTO is dead whether it knows it yet or not.
I'm a fan of tape backup when managed responsibly, but there's a fallacy that goes with recommending tape for backups: because you can train semitechnical users to dutifully change tapes and carry them offsite (e.g. on a bank run to a safe deposit box), tape gets recommended for businesses who don't have dedicated IT. But the duty of of maintaining the backup gets delegated from the original trained user, and changing the tapes becomes the whole of the backup maintenance: no one actually verifies that the backup job is running properly. I've been on calls to clients who've diligently changes their tapes nightly, but the backup software has been crashed for months...
I used to use tape for backup. The reason I stopped was that it stopped being cost effective. There was a time when you could buy one-generation-before-current tape drives, back your entire hard drive up more than once on a tape, and if you bought more than a dozen tapes, you spent less money overall than buying hard drives for those backups.
For about the last decade, tape has lagged so far behind hard drives that this hasn't been the case. You couldn't back up a high-capacity hard drive on last-generation tape. In fact, the current-generation LTO-6 only holds 2.5 TB uncompressed, so in the worst case, you can back up any hard drive built before 2010 (when the first 3 TB hard drives came out). And that tape technology didn't come out until 2012.
And you'll spend almost $3k on the drive, plus $45 per tape, or $18 per terabyte. Hard drives are currently running at $30 per TB. So ignoring differences in risk between a hard drive on a shelf and a tape, the break-even point is at a whopping 250 TB—almost an order of magnitude more than is reasonable for most businesses, much less consumers. Unless you're doing data warehousing, this break-even point is simply too high to be practical. Yet this is the smallest tape drive that is practical for any serious use, because one-generation-old drives (LTO-5) take 2–3 tapes just to back up an average desktop hard drive once, and the break-even point at $33 for 1.5 TB is still over 200 TB. That's just nuts. If you're willing to use ten tapes per drive, you could use LTO-3, but at $30 per terabyte plus the cost of the drive, you never break even at all.
To make a long story short, tape died the moment they stopped building tape drives targeted at normal consumers. As with all specialized products that are too expensive for normal people to afford, over time, cheaper, more consumer-friendly technologies begin to take advantage of their dramatically higher sales volume to drive R&D that allows them to eventually become "good enough" to be used in place of those niche "professional" products for their least demanding customers, thus causing the market to get smaller and smaller. As demand drops, prices then increase, causing even more potential customers to start looking for alternatives, until eventually the death spiral reaches its ultimate and inevitable end: a market that has dried up completely. This same scenario has played out in industry after industry over the years, and anybody who didn't see the writing on the wall more than a decade back must not have been paying attention.
Want me to stop saying tape is dead? Prove me wrong. Ship a consumer-grade LTO-6 drive for $300. Make tape a feasible backup medium for consumers and small businesses. Short of such a drastic step, tape is pretty much doomed to fade into obsolescence. At this point, I'm firmly convinced that the only real question anyone should be asking is how best to handle backups and archiving in a post-tape world; without a giant cash infusion and a radical change in the leadership of companies that build these products, it's not a matter of whether, but rather a matter of when.
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Yes I do, when he is making money off of my work, I get paid. Let me guess you are one of those complete scumbags that expect friends are your slaves?
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