[Novalug] carrying tapes

Nick Danger nick@hackermonkey.com
Thu Nov 20 15:57:20 EST 2008


James Ewing Cottrell 3rd wrote:
> Tapes are slow, and outside of their use as backup media, essentially 
> useless. Plus, they require super-expensive tape library jukeboxes which 
> are also, outside of their use as backup media, essentially useless too, 
> thereby changing the price equation back towards disk.
>   

As a friend of mine used to say, "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 
station wagon full of backup tapes."

Tape libraries are not super expensive. They can be had for a few 
thousand. And tapes are cheap. So the curve starts to form somewhere 
around 4-5 times the live data. If you want 12 copies of production data 
for monthly archiving (plus your weekly fulls and nightly incremental) 
you start to end up with a huge array of "items" be they disks or tapes. 
And at that level, tapes are cheaper.

As an added benefit, I saw a VXA demo where they were dunking tapes into 
a hot pot of coffee and then reading the data off them. They had to keep 
cleaning the tape drive as it would get dirty but they didn't lose a 
single bit of data. I know tapes are fragile but they are not nearly in 
the same class as hard drives.

Nick





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