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."

Comments

Shyeah, right.

[jra]

Magtape is the only viable medium for things which are actually "backups" as that term is understood in the professional IT arena. Every other possible medium for backups has faults which cripple it for one or more of the requirements which backups are required to fulfill -- primarily that's length of storage, but there are lot of other fun failure modes.

Sure, spinning magnetic storage, optical media, and flash drives each have some advantages for specific purposes.

But go pull the post-close EOY General Journal from 1996 off of one, I dare you.

And if you think that's an overly strict requirement, a) you're probably wrong, and b) I can come up with lots more that you won't.

My commercial backup guidelines are these:

You need it backed up on at least 4 pieces of media, of at least 3 different types, in at least 2 different cities, in at least 1 different state; bumping each of those numbers up by 1 is not unreasonable.

Only one backup can be on optical media; only one can be on spinning magnetic media, whether it's powered or not (this includes the cloud, and local external HDD backups, whether powered 24/7, alternating, or pulled and shelved).

Flash media is right out, as are SSDs.

I can pull 20 year old DC3000 tapes off my shelf and read them -- as long as I have a SCSI interface for the computer in question.

GNU tar is great that way.

Re:Shyeah, right.

[Lumpy]

I still have SDLT tapes that are still readable after 15 years. Hell I have Bernoulli disks that are still readable. The one working like new drive was packed with it along with an assortment of SCSI cables and a current working SCSI to USB adapter and a linux driver on a CD. hopefully if anyone needs to read that data in the future they will figure it out.

I actually did the same thing 3 years ago for a friend. he arrived with a stack of 9 track tapes and a desktop tape drive. Luckily I was able to find an older PC with an ISA slot and installed the card linux had drivers for it and even had the tools to convert the data to standard ASCII. Read all 20 tapes and handed him a DVD disk with the contents of all the tapes. Made a cool $2000 for sitting and watching tape spin. it was cool.

Re:Shyeah, right.

[PopeRatzo]

Hell I have Bernoulli disks that are still readable.

Nothing beats clay tablets.

The Babylonians can still pull up their post-close EOY General Journal from 2759 BC if they need it.

Re:Shyeah, right.

[sconeu]

How did they know to put "BC" on the EOY General Journal?

Re:Shyeah, right.

[brokenin2]

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.

Re:Shyeah, right.

[dgatwood]

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.

Re:Shyeah, right.

[PaddyM]

the reels on the tapes go
click clack clink
click clack clank
click clack clunk
the reels on the tape go
snip snap break
all through the head

The real backups go
to the cloud
to the cloud
to the cloud
The real backups go
to the cloud
all through the tubes ... or in iTunes

Right? Barbara Streisand... do do do do do do

Re:Shyeah, right.

[Anonymous Coward]

Texas is definitely a different state.

Re:Shyeah, right.

[Lumpy]

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?

Re:its all about selling Autoloaders

[jra]

LTO-9 goes to 25TB/cart, LTO-10 goes to 48TB.

Already announced.

And wouldn't it be interesting to know if that study was based on cartridge count or capacity?

Of *course* the cart count is going down, not *everyone's* data storage needs expand without bounds, and newer larger sizes imply some catch-up.

Tape Culture Fallacy

[daive]

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...

Re:So how is the price...

[Rob Riggs]

When measuring the cost of backups, the cost of the media is often a small footnote. The cost of off-site storage can end up costing way more depending on how frequently they pick up, how long you store the tapes, and how frequently you need to do emergency restores.. Note that you left off the "time" component of the AWS cost structure -- the cost is *per month*. Still, AWS has some serious advantages over tape -- like the cost of robotic tape drives and the housing and maintenance costs that go along with them (if you have that sort of need). Plus, if you are a big enough customer, those 1 cent/GB/mo costs go down quite a bit.

R&D: Only three companies left

[scsirob]

Tape is great for archive purposes. It would be a shame if LTO dies.
The biggest threat to LTO is the lack of vendors developing drives. At this time only very few companies do R&D for tape devices. IBM, HP and Oracle are the only serious players.

Oracle develops only Enterprise class drives (T10K), not LTO. The market for those drives is quite small, which means the R&D cost needs to be recovered from a relatively low volume. That makes them bl**dy expensive.

HP develops LTO. They have to do R&D for LTO only, as they have no enterprise class drives. LTO is considered commodity so margins are too low to spend a lot on R&D. They will therefor struggle to be cost effective.

IBM develops both an enterprise class (Jaguar) and LTO tape drives. From a tech perspective, IBM are in the best position, as they can develop new technology for their enterprise drives, recoup cost in that segment, and then commoditize the technology in their LTO drives. Unfortunately IBM no longer wants to be a hardware company.

This does not bode well for tape technology in general. I've made a good living from it writing software for tape drives, but I guess all good things come to an end.