IBM does it again.

[just Warren]

New tape technology can put 330 TB in the palm of your hand.

[Brad Johnson]

Daaaaaang. 

I wish I wasn't so biased against tape. My initial experience with it was less than stellar. I remember, with much chagrin, the damnably bad tape backup systems when I was with Radio Shack in the late 80s. IIRC it was DC6150 based. They never worked that I recall. In a supposedly cost-saving move, TandyCorp forced us to reuse the same two cartridges over, and over, and over again. It was an unusual day if the backup completed without an error. When the drive didn't error out it would eat the tape. Replacement drives were corporate-shop refurbs that looked like they'd been reconditioned in a cement mixer full of anvils. I think all they did was swipe the heads with some alcohol and call it good. I distinctly remember going almost a month without a valid backup because I got replacement drive after replacement drive which failed on first use. Corporate would get all kinds of bent out of shape if the backup was corrupted, which they always were. When a couple of managers had the audacity to present the problem at the annual managers meeting they were pounced upon by corporate. Another reason I'm so very glad I got away from that mess when I did. That was about the time RS really started their downhill slide.

The Travan systems I worked with in the mid-90s were actually pretty decent but I never could rid myself of the feeling that they were always about three microseconds away from hosing up the whole system.

Brad

[AJ Dual]

A modern LTO formfactor jukebox is pretty fire and forget.

And we upgraded to LTO6 last year, and the 6.4TB tapes cut the number I have to case up and have Iron Mountain pick up twice a week in half. We put out roughly 60-70TB a week for deep storage. Errors or a failure?... not since um. Never.

When our bi-yearly order of LTO tapes come in, it's about 3.2 Petabytes of tape.

[Fly320s]

A modern LTO formfactor jukebox is pretty fire and forget.

And we upgraded to LTO6 last year, and the 6.4TB tapes cut the number I have to case up and have Iron Mountain pick up twice a week in half. We put out roughly 60-70TB a week for deep storage. Errors or a failure?... not since um. Never.

When our bi-yearly order of LTO tapes come in, it's about 3.2 Petabytes of tape.

Is Iron Mountain destroying the tapes or keeping them in secure storage?

What do you do that needs so much data backed up?

[AJ Dual]

Is Iron Mountain destroying the tapes or keeping them in secure storage?

What do you do that needs so much data backed up?

Financial. Iron Mountain is keeping them.

In theory at least, we have everything going back to the founding of the company in the 1990's. Let's just say that we're working on a retention policy more aimed at 5 years or whatnot. It's really not so much to do with the actual financial data, but a rather aggressive IT culture over redundancy, and best practices for continuation of service, disaster recover, business continuity planning etc.

My firm bends over backwards to be on the up and up and above reproach. However we do get roped into a discovery motion etc. now and then as an innocent bystander, and someone figures out we have 20+ years of data, and wants to use us as a patsy to bury someone else in data as an extrajudicial tactic... and we actually farking have it... that could be a PITA. 

I really kind of wish I had a few thousand acres and could be allowed to do the disposal when it finally comes. 

[HeroHog]

Is Iron Mountain destroying the tapes or keeping them in secure storage?

What do you do that needs so much data backed up?

Shhhhh! (he works at redtube.com) 

[Scout26]

Financial. Iron Mountain is keeping them.

In theory at least, we have everything going back to the founding of the company in the 1990's. Let's just say that we're working on a retention policy more aimed at 5 years or whatnot. It's really not so much to do with the actual financial data, but a rather aggressive IT culture over redundancy, and best practices for continuation of service, disaster recover, business continuity planning etc.

My firm bends over backwards to be on the up and up and above reproach. However we do get roped into a discovery motion etc. now and then as an innocent bystander, and someone figures out we have 20+ years of data, and wants to use us as a patsy to bury someone else in data as an extrajudicial tactic... and we actually farking have it... that could be a PITA. 

I really kind of wish I had a few thousand acres and could be allowed to do the disposal when it finally comes. 

BURN THE FLOPPIES !!!!   

[just Warren]

I guess that data apocalypse just got a bit further away (if they can make this work economically).

[just Warren]

In a few years this will probably only cost $10.

[just Warren]

Sandisk bringin' it.

Between me and my whole family I don't think we could fill this thing. But if it was cheaper I'd probably get one.

This for people that just have to have a lot of things stuffed into a tiny package. Seems like it would be easy to lose. Still cool though.

[RevDisk]

LTO7 has been out for couple years, and natively has 6.0 TB per tape. 15TB with compression. For roughly $90. And will last a couple decades.

Density isn't the problem. Cheap and reliable is what enterprises need.

16TB SSD's are shipping now, though the shipments are already bought out for a very long time. 4TB SSD's are available for routine purchase.

A modern LTO formfactor jukebox is pretty fire and forget.

And we upgraded to LTO6 last year, and the 6.4TB tapes cut the number I have to case up and have Iron Mountain pick up twice a week in half. We put out roughly 60-70TB a week for deep storage. Errors or a failure?... not since um. Never.

When our bi-yearly order of LTO tapes come in, it's about 3.2 Petabytes of tape.

Sadly, not my Quantum tapeloader. Drive is going bad, and I'm arguing with the beancounters we need a replacement. We backup to two alternating NAS's, and back that up to the Backblaze cloud, because it's cheap and why not? Still need an offline friggin tape capacity anyways.

[KD5NRH]

Drive is going bad, and I'm arguing with the beancounters we need a replacement.

"That's a nice set of personnel records the accounting department has.  Sure would be a shame if all the backups of them got corrupted."

[RevDisk]

"That's a nice set of personnel records the accounting department has.  Sure would be a shame if all the backups of them got corrupted."

Backups on the ERP server. Backup instance of the servers, that normally we use for testing. Backups on the NAS's. Cloud backups of the NAS's.

This is just for long term retention. Tape is incredibly slow, but cheap, durable and long lasting. With the NAS's, I can crash recover an entire VM in minutes. Full recovery in... I dunno, thirty minutes to and hour. Not really, because in case the backup software isn't working, the ERP system also backs up the SQL databases directly to the NAS nightly, so it'd be copy, paste, Restore. Backups run every 12 hours and we keep 45 days worth of backups. There's absolutely no operational need for historical data. Like email servers, you're mildly hosed if the latest backup is bad.

Like what AJ is saying, it's just for retention and the really outlaying circumstances were you need a document from X years ago. Normally for lawsuits.

[KD5NRH]

Backups on the ERP server. Backup instance of the servers, that normally we use for testing. Backups on the NAS's. Cloud backups of the NAS's.

This is just for long term retention. Tape is incredibly slow, but cheap, durable and long lasting.

And, unlike the others, inherently airgapped.  (Unless you just leave the same tape in all the time and overwrite it at each backup.)

[Devonai]

In 1994, as an insufferable Star Trek geek, I bought the USS Enterprise 1701-D Technical Manual.  It mentioned that the storage capacity of the ship's main computer was 4TB.  I'm sure back then, it seemed like a sufficiently high number.  

[just Warren]

Samsung's 30 TB SSD in production.

[MechAg94]

Samsung's 30 TB SSD in production.

Am I reading that right?  It is basically a box full of flash drive chips with a high interface speed?

[lupinus]

In 1994, as an insufferable Star Trek geek, I bought the USS Enterprise 1701-D Technical Manual.  It mentioned that the storage capacity of the ship's main computer was 4TB.  I'm sure back then, it seemed like a sufficiently high number.  

They probably didn't account for all of the cute cat pictures and porn.

Sent from my Pixel XL using Tapatalk

[KD5NRH]

In 1994, as an insufferable Star Trek geek, I bought the USS Enterprise 1701-D Technical Manual.  It mentioned that the storage capacity of the ship's main computer was 4TB.  I'm sure back then, it seemed like a sufficiently high number.  

Enterprise apparently didn't even have WiFi, since they were often seen distributing PADDs as needed.  Even if you needed something special, wouldn't you just push an update to the one the crewman already has?  (And presumably everybody would have one, since it would be a lot easier to send out mass messages that way than assume people will be at a given station when many of them have duties all over the ship.)

The other odd bit would be integration; you've still got someone on each away team lugging around a tricorder, usually at least one of the longer range handheld communicators, and pretty much zero survival gear.  Wouldn't it make more sense to have the tricorder sensor package and the long range comm be modular add-ons for the roughly-smartphone-sized PADD variant?  Even though it's putting all your eggs in one basket, it's a much smaller basket, so each team member could be carrying both modules, and maybe a spare PADD or two per team.  Then maybe when they go to desert and/or microbe-rich planets they can carry some f'ing clean water and tiny water collectors that use the phasers to heat any moist material or non-potable water and then condense it out like a solar still.

Of course, then several episodes would have been about ten minutes long unless they included a half hour of footage of major cast member lost on a planet light years from home just camping out in a fair amount of luxury until someone figures out where to look for them.

[just Warren]

Nimbus just dropped a 100TB SSD the size of a regular hard-drive.

They say that's enough room for 20 million songs. Wouldn't that be ALL the songs? How many songs can there be?

[Fly320s]

Nimbus just dropped a 100TB SSD the size of a regular hard-drive.

They say that's enough room for 20 million songs. Wouldn't that be ALL the songs? How many songs can there be?

20 million and one.  Time to upgrade your HDD.

According to this site: http://www.marsbands.com/2011/10/97-million-and-counting/  there are 97 million songs in the world.  You're gonna need a bigger boat HDD.

[just Warren]

I'm still absurdly fascinated by tape drives.

I'm not even a computer guy. I like how they're retro and futuristic at the same time and how capable they are. In another thread someone posted a picture of a tape library that was like something out of a science-fiction movie.

With the exception of capacity, the performance characteristics of tape and hard drives are, of course, very different. The long length of the tape held in a cartridge—normally hundreds of meters—results in average data-access times of 50 to 60 seconds compared with just 5 to 10 milliseconds for hard drives. But the rate at which data can be written to tape is, surprisingly enough, more than twice the rate of writing to disk.

(Bolding is mine.) And I did not know that.

[Cliffh]

I've been considering getting some type of backup for our laptops, re-reading this thread had me bounce over to Amazon for a look at external drives.  3TB for less than $100!  My 1st HDD was 10MB and cost (IIRC) ~$200.

Might just have to pick up 3TB or so.

[HeroHog]

We had an automated tape library at BrassEagle and it was COOL! there was a robot arm in it that handled the tapes and instead of linear motion, it used fluid, human like, arcing motions. Amazing to watch at the time. It also had a fiber-optic net connection directly into the managed backbone for the server farm. FAST and WIDE data throughput!

[Jamisjockey]

Daaaaaang. 

I wish I wasn't so biased against tape. My initial experience with it was less than stellar. I remember, with much chagrin, the damnably bad tape backup systems when I was with Radio Shack in the late 80s.
Brad

Just a hunch, but I bet the tech is different between the mid 80's and now.    That's 30 years bro.  Bag phones were the *expletive deleted*it in the 80's.  Now my phone has more processing power than the first moon landing capsule.