[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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