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)?"

Re:Not news.

[Pinky's Brain]

Modern cheap SATA drives have average linear read and write speeds of around 120 MB/s.

Re:Not news.

[h4rr4r]

Please name a disk that can keep it up for the whole disk. This will be 1TB+ of random data written in 1 shot.

I have not seen any yet, but would love to find one.

Re:Not news.

[afidel]

Dude, my biggest problem is keeping the damn LTO4 drives fed at MINIMUM write speeds for file server type small file workloads. 72x15k spindles isn't enough with only one volume being backed up, metadata retrieval makes it too slow, I need to have multiple volumes backing up simultaneously to keep the things from shoeshining.

Re:Not news.

[Pinky's Brain]

If it's really important to you ... make a lot of partitions, RAID0 the lot of them ... hey presto, a volume which will maintain average linear read and write speed across the entire volume.

Re:Not news.

[Culture20]

I fail to see how making partitions on one real device will do anything other than lower that average speed.

You are correct, it will lower the speed, but I believe GP is correct that it will bring most data points closer to that slower average.

If you meant multiple physical volumes in RAID0 then I ask the following:
And how do I get this volume off to the storage location?
Will the OEM say it is safe for transport?
Is it light enough for our female sysadmin to carry it?

1) Quantum Teleportation? Maybe a truck and packing foam if your teleporter is down.
2) Who cares what the OEM says? Are you planning to sue a tape manufacturer when a tape goes bad? Good luck proving it was the transport that did it.
3) Unless she's an invalid. Anyone who can lift a HDD can transport a disk array.

I say if JBOD backup with multiple copies is good enough to transport Antarctic science data, it's good enough for transporting backups. As long as the backups are tested at the storage site on arrival, then there's not a problem with disks.

Re:Real link

[TooMuchToDo]

More than 17,000, all stored in huge Storagetek libraries:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/eb/Storagetek-tape_drive_hg.jpg [wikimedia.org]

More info on CERN's infosystems for the collider, as they're the Tier-0 site (which means, in realtime, they take the raw detector data, strip it to the bare essentials, and than shove it out to Tier-1 sites at up to 40Gb/s (depending on the detector/experiment):

http://news.cnet.com/8300-11386_3-76-2.html?keyword=CERN [cnet.com]

LABEL them FFS

[bsercombe72]

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.

Disk to Disk Backups

[anexkahn]

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.