Slashdot Mirror
220TB Tapes Show Tape Storage Still Has a Long Future
alphadogg writes: IBM and Fujifilm have figured out how to fit 220TB of data on a standard-size tape that fits in your hand, flexing the technology's strengths as a long-term storage medium. The prototype Fujifilm tape and accompanying drive technology from IBM labs packs 88 times as much data onto a tape as industry-standard LTO-6 systems using the same size cartridge, IBM says. LTO6 tape can hold 2.5TB, uncompressed, on a cartridge about 4 by 4 inches across and 2 centimeters thick. The new technologies won't come out in products for several years.
Tape backups have been an enterprise only product for years. And they are backing up enterprise (server-grade) hard drives that cost substantially more than consumer SATA drives.
You can pretty much wake up now. Tape outperforms hard drives every single day but of course it depends on how much data we're talking about, the type of data and how you want to access it. For a typical enterprise backup scenario, you will not be able to replace a modern tape robot with a 2000+ tapes with hard drives. It's just not going to scale.
If you don't need to store tremendous amounts of data or to keep this data in more than a dozen different places, spinning hard drives will do just fine.
If you need to store petabytes of data in redundant locations, tape robots are your friend. ;-)
As far as I can recall, tape backup systems have never been a consumer product. At least, I don't recall tape systems ever being marketed that way.
I think the big difference nowadays though, is that tape backup used to be the only real viable option for small business' computers and servers. Nowadays, it seems like cloud-based backups like Amazon Glacier are a much more sensible for smaller systems.
BTW, redundant HDDs as a backup system is a really bad idea unless you:
a) take them offline, and
b) store them offsite.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
These guys http://hardware.slashdot.org/s... probably would have preferred to be able to come back up after some number of days, rather than ever. That said, not all losses of data are total, so it might make sense to have a tape system for catastrophes and some other system for correcting a smaller mistake.
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
RED drives are specifically designed for RAID enclosures to prevent early failure due to vibration and constant sleep/wake cycles.
Baloney. If this were true, it would show up in reliability data. It does not.
Sure in some situations you can get by with regular consumer gear, but in other situations it's asking for trouble.
Thanks for the advice. But I prefer to listen to people that know what they are talking about, and have data to back it up.
Btw, I have some super premium gold plated SATA cables that will DOUBLE the reliability of your enterprise drives!!! Please post your credit card number and address.
"I don't understand why anyone would use tape. After all I've never used it/not for years/etc."
If you feel the urge to say words like this, just stop after the first 3 words. You don't understand. That's enough right there.
Some people have volumes of data that you cannot fathom. Some organizations have use cases that you haven't encountered. Maybe even some organizations make decisions that' could be handled another way, and maybe that different way might be better too. But's that's speculative based upon NO information.
The continuing demand for tape pretty well speaks for itself though.