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Is LTO Tape On Its Way Out? 284

Posted by Soulskill from the IT-no-longer-caught-on-tape dept.
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."
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Is LTO Tape On Its Way Out? More

Is LTO Tape On Its Way Out?

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  • Shyeah, right. (Score:5, Informative)

    by jra ( 5600 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2014 @08:37PM (#48463867)

    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. (Score:4, Informative)

      by Lumpy ( 12016 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2014 @08:50PM (#48463945) Homepage

      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. (Score:5, Funny)

        by PopeRatzo ( 965947 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2014 @09:11PM (#48464021) Journal

        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.

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • I have 1X DVDs going back to 99/2K that still read too, that is what happens when you don't buy crap brands.

          This. I don't understand why people shun optical media so much. When a good burner and a good disc is used, it's still a great archival medium.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by jbengt ( 874751 )
            Commercially printed Read Only optical disc data can be OK, but the Read-Write consumer discs rely on dyes that will degrade & lose data over time.

        • I guess I'll have to bite the bullet and get a BD burner soon, does anybody here have exp with using BD for storage? How are they holding up?

          I have two BD-R drives. Much like with DVDs, I use a good quality media: pretty much all of the good DVD brands also make good BD-Rs, e.g. Verbatim. I store the discs in a cool, dry place away from sunlight (disc binders). After about four years I have had no problems reading any disc I have burned.

          Blu-ray discs have two advantages over DVD. First is size: a single lay

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) *

        I have CDs I burned in 1996 that are still in good condition and readable on any modern optical drive. Obviously, these are Taiyo Yuden archival grade discs, not cheap rubbish, but not terribly expensive either. You really can't beat optical media for backwards compatibility - a modern BluRay drive can still read the first CDs ever pressed without any problem.

        These days my preferred format is archival BluRay. Tapes need expensive drives that wear out or can mangle the tape, and while Unix backup software wi

        • expensive drives that wear out or can mangle the tape

          This is my main problem with removable magnetic media. The simple act of reading the data actually degrades the storage medium. And if you have a bad drive, it can actively destroy any disk/tape you put in there. And it's actually hard to diagnose if the problem is with the disk or the drive, so you're likely to destroy a few disks/tapes before you figure it out. I've had floppy drives, zip drives and tape drives that have all ruined the storage media.

    • in at least 1 different state

      Are you expecting an entire state to disappear? I mean, I've heard jokes about California falling into the ocean, but a requirement of having backups in two different states seems kind of extreme.

      But I guess it could happen. That's why I always insist on keeping at least one backup in low Earth orbit and another on one of the moons of Jupiter. This way, if Galactus shows up and eats the Earth, I'll still be able to pull my post-close EOY General Journal from 1996. Or at leas

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by afabbro ( 33948 )

        in at least 1 different state

        Are you expecting an entire state to disappear? I mean, I've heard jokes about California falling into the ocean, but a requirement of having backups in two different states seems kind of extreme.

        Particularly because "two different states" could mean "Rhode Island and Delaware" which is very different than "Alaska and Florida."

      • The idea is that your backups should be far enough apart that they won't be caught in the same natural disaster. As an example, I live in Southern California, just north of Los Angeles. If I had data that I really needed to protect, I'd have two off-site backups. One would be far enough away from home that a flood, tsunami (My home is about 170 feet above sea level and within a few miles of the coast.) or wildfire wouldn't get both of them. The other one would be far enough away that I'd not have to wor

        • The idea is that your backups should be far enough apart that they won't be caught in the same natural disaster.

          Oh, OK. That makes sense. Like if you were in the Northeast when Hurricane Sandy hit. You'd probably want it like several states away to be safe. Maybe one in New Jersey and one in Chicago, where the only natural disasters are the Cubs and Bears.

      • The orbital mechanics can get a bit tricky; but interplanetary distances open the possibility of reviving good, old-fashioned, delay-line memory...

        Just think of how much data you could keep in-flight if you just replaced Pluto with a nice orbital mirror and told your vendor "GIVE ME AN XFP MODULE OF TERRIBLE POWER."

        For real archiving, of course, you'll need to look at siting your mirror outside the solar system for a longer round trip.

      • Example: the metropolis area of Kansas City is larger than the state of Delaware, over twice the size of Rhode Island and about half the size of Connecticut and New Jersey. So yes, it's a good idea.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) *

        I just use a laser to etch my backups into the surface of the moon, and a telescope to read them back. Occasionally I get bit rot when a meteorite hits it or a Chinese rover makes tracks over it, but that's what parity is for.

    • Re:Shyeah, right. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by brokenin2 ( 103006 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2014 @09:23PM (#48464075) Homepage

      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. (Score:5, Insightful)

        by dgatwood ( 11270 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2014 @11:21PM (#48464509) Homepage Journal

        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: (Score:2)

          by dbraden ( 214956 )

          You're absolutely right. Just a few weeks ago I decided to look into backing up my home storage to tape. The tapes themselves weren't terribly expensive, but the drives... couldn't believe what they cost. And it didn't look like eBay had any deals on them either (or, at least, not at prices I'm willing to pay).

          I think $200-$250 would be a better price point, but I would certainly go for one at $300, even if it was an LTO-5 drive.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by s.petry ( 762400 )

            You're absolutely right. Just a few weeks ago I decided to look into backing up my home storage to tape.

            Do you really believe GP was talking about a home system with a few computers worth of data? Sorry, but you are not going to be lunking around HDs for backups after manually bar-coding, labeling, and cataloging them all for a decent sized business. LTO is surely not something a home user would find much benefit in, but on the business side there are numerous benefits. Lots of factors involved, but generally for even a small business it's worth the added data security even when it may not be required.

            In t

            • I'd love to use tape for home use. I have a NAS that I back a couple of laptops up onto. It has 3x2TB drives in a RAID-Z configuration with compression and deduplication enabled for the backup volumes. If I could get an eSATA tape drive something with 2-4TB cartridges then I could easily back that up and store the tapes somewhere else. LTO-5 / LTO-6 would do the job. LTO-5 tapes are pretty cheap now and LTO-6 isn't too bad, but the drives are insanely expensive. For the price of the drive, I could buy

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by dave420 ( 699308 )
              If you are going to criticise others' spelling and grammar it behoves you to not make such mistakes yourself...

            • You've missed the OP's point. When a format becomes uneconomic for the mass market, people stop developing for it, because they'll want to do development on something they can sell to a lot of people. It falls behind. This causes more people to stop using it, which causes more people to stop development. The death spiral continues until the format falls so far behind that its continued use can't possibly be justified. Tape isn't all the way there yet, but it's getting there. Look at non-commodity serv

        • 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.

          By your own logic, 250 TB would be quickly reached by merely a hundred old workstations and servers from 2010 - that's silly.
          Also, we use raw storage in the context of _individual_ incompressible backup sets, not backup data at scale, because very few places backup a high ratio of incompressible data overall.

          What's the cost of doubling your storage capacity with either technology, for a few iterations? It's buy more tapes vs. $2&%fhqwgads!!1
          You'll buy a jukebox and few drives at some point but be on yo

          • Also, we use raw storage in the context of _individual_ incompressible backup sets, not backup data at scale, because very few places backup a high ratio of incompressible data overall.

            I'm not convinced that's true. At home, my NAS uses compression, so the raw capacity of the tapes is likely the relevant one, unless the tape somehow manages to recompress lz4-compressed blocks and gain a benefit (not entirely impossible, as lz4 is optimised for speed, but pretty unlikely). At work, the NetApp filer that the tape backups run from also uses compresses and deduplicates online, so not much redundancy there either.

            What's the cost of doubling your storage capacity with either technology, for a few iterations? It's buy more tapes vs. $2&%fhqwgads!!1

            Not really, unless you're talking about longer backup cycles. With tape, the b

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by RenHoek ( 101570 )

          If you think 250TB of backup is a lot, then you don't need tape.

          I currently backup about 1PB and data storage is growing exponentially here (gene sequencing data). Tape is the only cost effective solution for us.

          I do agree though that tapedrives are ridiculously expensive but it's a sellers market. Tapedrives don't sell in massive quantities so the price stays up, mainly because there just aren't that many suppliers.

          On the other hand. I called a shop a while ago to see what they'd give for our 5x LTO4 taped

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) *

          Consumers have mostly moved to external hard drives or cloud storage. I know everyone on Slashdot hates the cloud, but as a backup medium it isn't bad. Off-site, managed by someone else and low cost due to being shared by many other users. You can encrypt everything for privacy and use multiple providers if you don't trust any single one. Might as well make use of that upstream bandwidth you paid for over night.

          Most importantly it's easy. No need to remember to do it, no need to rotate disks off site or plu

      • That near-instant access also allows other uses. For example, when a small business client's web site is defaced or simply broken, I can run rsync --dry-run and tell them exactly which files have changed - in minutes, while they're still on the phone. I can restore the damaged files just as quickly.

        Tape has it's place, but online offsite backups, done right, have some very significant advantages too.

      • Hang on, I'll get to the mod comment in a moment. First things first, which is a complete line of crap if you are dealing with medium to large amounts of data in your DR plan and have a long term requirement for DR. Keep in mind that the person you are responding to is talking about long term DR strategy that dates back decades.

        I'm not sure which world you are living in where 10 year old hard drives require less space than LTO, but this is not physically possible. Are you trying to claim that you are usi

      • You might want to look at using ZFS instead of rsync. I switched a while back, and it was definitely worth the initial effort of changing the file system on the server.

        With rsync you can get inconsistencies because not all files are backed up at the same instant. ZFS snapshots get around this.

        If you modify a large file (say a 100 GB virtual machine), rsync will re-backup the entire file. ZFS will keep track of the part that changed and only copy that.

        Also if a file on one of your multiple backups is subtly

        • Snapshots are available in many filesystems as well as at the volume level via LVM and similar systems. Rsync will happily detect and copy changes without propagating whole files; it will even do in-place updates for circumstances where that's relevant. ZFS cannot detect bit rot until and unless you ask it to read all the data necessary to generate the checksum, which is exactly what rsync will do if you ask it to always use checksums.

          There's nothing wrong with ZFS -- if you have an appropriate workload and

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kjella ( 173770 )

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

      I've got school stuff older than that, copied from one generation of drives to the next since the 1980s without ever needing a tape drive. Most data is lost because there's not enough redundancy and integrity checking, a private backup cloud makes total sense to me just add another node and it'll sync up another perfect copy. Doesn't matter what the underlying hardware is, as long as there's enough of them and it gets replaced in a timely fashion. Assuming that takes care of physical and geographical redund

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by rtb61 ( 674572 )

      Hate to burst your bubble but magnetic bits on plastic are magnetic bits on plastic whether tape, disc or flash drives. Don't become confused with old tapes being reliable, they are reliable temporarily because they were a low density storage format and over years as the storage density increase, just like hard disk drives they tended to become less reliable. Flash media is happy sitting in the dark for a very long time, it wears out with multiple writes not multiple reads or very rare reads. The advantage

      • The problem with flash media (aside from its insane cost) is that they tend to catastrophically fail unpredictably, especially when improperly dismounted..

    • Re:Shyeah, right. (Score:4, Funny)

      by PaddyM ( 45763 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2014 @11:57PM (#48464597) Homepage

      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

    • "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."

      At least 2 different cities means two or more cities.
      At least 1 different state means one or more states.

      Well, at least, you don't store it in zero states.

    • Our backup requirements aren't as strict as yours but we make daily backups to tape (LTO-6), clone it and send it offsite for 5 weeks before it becomes eligible for recycling. Monthly archival backups we make 2 copies of and send one offsite for 10 years. Next year we will get a deduplicating disk backup system but we'll still copy the backups to tape and send them offsite. Between backup and clones of backups we have around 200 tapes in the rotation. Tape is still the most cost effective way to get our

    • Digital data needs to move.
      Tape is analog thinking. Get your data write it down and hide it somewhere.
      Digital data needs to move. To have the data properly backed up it constantly needs to move. So if you have ssd drives only. Just as long as you are taking the data and moving it to an other drive and that is moving to an other drive your data is being saved for the long run.
      Once digital data stops moving it is open to threats from the environment.
      Tapes go bad, ssd go bad, any storage medium has issues. To

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jythie ( 914043 )
      Which is why I suspect that the tape market will adjust, but is no deader than usual. If nothing else, as I recall, people have been saying the tape market is 'on its way out' for decades now, yet it is still the only media (generally) that you can pull those arguments from decades ago out of storage and laugh at them again.

    • You left out the offsite station wagon. If *that's* on the way out, the mag tapes should worry

  • For some time the tapes that were readily available had a huge capacity advantage over hard drives. That advantage is quickly shrinking. While there is still an edge in cost-per-TB for tape, that is decaying quickly as well. If tape can't reestablish that advantage we might see LTO and any other remaining formats go the way of the dodo while data centers change to spinning HDDs or even SSDs as the price of the latter continues to come down (while its long-term reliability goes up).

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jra ( 5600 )

      I'm not sure I buy this argument; it seems to me to be based on too narrow a view of the universe of different use cases.

      I certainly haven't seen *all* of them myself, but in general, I've seen enough to be skeptical of "tape can't do it arguments.

      And LTO-10 is 48TB/cart. Uncompressed, I assume.

      • And LTO-10 is 48TB/cart. Uncompressed, I assume.

        Afaict the highest version of LTO you can actually buy is LTO-6 with a capacitity of 2.5TB. I consider it highly doubtful that LTO-10 is much more than a set of goals/desired specifications on a roadmap.

  • Tape sales have dropped in half, but tape capacity has increased 3-fold in the same time.

    I would imagine that those who were using more than 1 tape 6 years ago to do their backups would require fewer tapes now to do the same job.

    Maybe their niche is still rock solid (albeit stagnant), but technological development of the product has reduced demand.

    • Tape sales have dropped in half, but tape capacity has increased 3-fold in the same time.

      I would imagine that those who were using more than 1 tape 6 years ago to do their backups would require fewer tapes now to do the same job.

      Nope. Because in six years, their backup volume has increased 5-fold. That's how much disk capacity has increased in past 6 years.

  • Tape Culture Fallacy (Score:5, Insightful)

    by daive ( 145428 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2014 @09:41PM (#48464161)

    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'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...

      This is not a tape problem, it's a very common backup system problem, regardless of the design. Backups are an insurance policy people let lapse and try to make claims on later.

    • 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've seen the same thing, but I think the entire backup process is something of a kabuki dance because just seeing "Job success" is a false sense of security in and of itself.

      Do you know if the media is usable to restore from? Do you know if the data backed up is capable of actually being used to restore to function whatever system was backed up?

      I think most places fall down on these two items. Where I work we are told to do restores from backup media to validate usability -- but just very partial restore

  • "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."
    -Andrew S. Tanenbaum

    • Never underestimate the latency of your archive room attempting to restore a station wagon full of tapes...

    • Never underestimate the bandwidth of a beowulf cluster of self-driving station wagons full of tapes hurtling down the highway.

    • Never under-estimate the price of a 1/2" tape from Andrew S Tanebaum.

      If they had been cheaper, I would have been using Unix three years earlier!

      Never under-estimate the disaster of a station wagon full of LTO6 tapes hurtling down the Grand Canyon! (I said that).

      (Or major Glacier down time, just when you need it).

  • Offsite storage farms (Score:3)

    by Webmoth ( 75878 ) on Tuesday November 25, 2014 @10:31PM (#48464345) Homepage

    Tape media's greatest benefit is its long storage life. Providing you have the equipment to do it, you could read a tape created 25 years ago.

    Tape media's greatest liability is its long storage life. Will you be able to find equipment to read it 25 years from now? If not, you have what we call write-only media.

    I think that tape is going to disappear as a viable storage medium, at least in the small business sector. The equipment and media is expensive, and most small businesses don't have the resources to employ someone trained in proper media management.

    The replacement is going to be offsite storage farms, whether from a third-party cloud provider, or farms owned by the company that needs the backups. As the per-byte cost of disk storage continually and rapidly falls and wide-area network (Internet) bandwidth increases, offsite/online backups are becoming more and more feasible. Data deduplication and image management software technologies mean that a company can have daily backups completely automated and available as far back as they want. Restoring a file or two from these backups is quick and easy. My company already supports several small businesses using this backup technology; as existing tape drives fail they are seldom being replaced with more tape hardware.

    The downside of offsite/online backups is that bare-metal recovery of a failed system from those backups is still extremely time-consuming. Eventually the bandwidth will become available to make it viable; until then tape still seems to be the best option for bare-metal recovery.

  • Science (Score:3)

    by chuckymonkey ( 1059244 ) <charles.d.burton ... il.com minus bsd> on Tuesday November 25, 2014 @11:16PM (#48464497) Journal
    Working in climate science I can tell you that tape for us isn't going anywhere. Our investment gets larger in it every year, at least monetarily and capacity wise. Several of our groups have growth curves that scale linearly with the output of the supercomputers, meaning our growth is almost exponential. Most of this data is static and doesn't really change once it's been produced, but it does need to be read from time to time. There's no other solution out there that takes little to no power to store, no cooling, and can keep the data for years with minimal loss of integrity. We have data that goes back to the 1940's that we have to keep almost forever, this historical data is hugely important in how we create the models and cannot be lost. So we have to have somewhere to store all that data for the long haul, LTO is the medium of choice because it's vendor agnostic, fast enough, cheap, and large enough to handle what we need it to handle.

  • Tape is dead in most small business already. There's just no point in it. Putting all your eggs in one tape-format basket means that when you have a fire, not only do you have to spend days getting your data back, you've also got to pay a small fortune for the machine that can do that (if those drives even exist any more).

    Extended NAS systems are what I see taking over from tape. Automatic network replication to a copy that then gets marked read-only, forwarded and verified to other NAS further down the

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday November 26, 2014 @08:49AM (#48466317)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

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