iIBM and Oracle enterprise tape shipments are not included]
Tapes are still cheaper than disk
Several public cloud deep archives use tape, such as AWS’s Glacier
ESG found a majority increasing their commitment to tape (61%)
Tape’s two big advantages:
low cost
longevity
Big drawback:
lengthy file access time
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@Chris.Childerhose and @JMeixner That sounds interesting. What product are you reviewing and where would you position that?
I am reviewing a FujiFilm offering but not sure where I would position it just yet. We do have a product current QStar SOS that does the write to S3 and tape out.
@Chris.Childerhoseand @JMeixner That sounds interesting. What product are you reviewing and where would you position that?
I am looking at the PoiNT Archival Gateway.
Just Playing around at the moment. I will give some notes of my experiences to the community after I got some results.
I think tape is great, I think the stigma it suffers is due to misuse like deduplication appliances. The issue isn’t in the technology but it’s deployment. I don’t believe tape should be used as an air gap solution (or not the primary air gap solution at least), for a single reason, it’s so slow!
I was dispatched to a school trust due to a ransomware attack, I discovered due to the attack vector and the entire backup solution being domain joined the primary backup repo had been encrypted, the customer then proceeded to recover from tape but it took between 1-2 weeks for all of their data to be recovered and brought online. It was nearly a week before core services were even restored.
With solutions such as Veeam Cloud Connect it makes sense to use VCC for air gap and keep tape for long term archiving purposes only. Most customers will keep their tape systems far longer than necessary and this causes them larger issues in the long run when using this as their DR response.
With v11 pushing immutability this will provide a better fault domain for customers not wishing to go to the cloud route.
Well said Mike. The immutable backups have taken it on tape and it's just about time to see how long tapes will survive.
Still, IMHO tapes are the best when it comes to total isolation to the digital world where anything including an immutable copy can be hacked.
Yes it is! But you can see no doubled values from Gen8 to Gen9. Read here why:
With v11 pushing immutability this will provide a better fault domain for customers not wishing to go to the cloud route.
i love it !!!!
ultimate solution against crypto ransomware
I hope people won’t be too greedy with immutability. It’s really concrete when the linux host who host XFS is enough hardened or you will always exposed to side attack (voluntary degradation)
immutability adds another security step to complete the 3-2-1 rule. Obviously it is always necessary to secure (hardening server) your infrastructure as per best practice.
I didn't even know that such solutions exist. So you have (immutable) object storage for quick copies/restores and tape for long term and offsite. Looking forward to see a blog post here :)
@JMeixner@Chris.Childerhose
Once we decide on what solution I will try to do a blog post on it if my company permits me to. :)
Tape still secure. I reconize is old, but is GOLD. Salved a dozens of sysadmins jobs.
Petabyte tape cartridges are coming down the line!
According to Fujifilm, we could see 1PB cartridges from 2035!
14 years are a long time in IT and everything will sure evolve a bit till then, but how fast will suche a tape drive need to read/write and more important which backup storage will provide enough bandwidth? If you look at the capacity/storage ratio of the different LTO generations it looks like capacity is increasing faster then performance. So let’s say you’ll need 24h to fill the 1PB drive, then it would take about 12GB/s; make it 10h and performance increases to 29GB/s
Petabyte tape cartridges are coming down the line!
According to Fujifilm, we could see 1PB cartridges from 2035!
14 years are a long time in IT and everything will sure evolve a bit till then, but how fast will suche a tape drive need to read/write and more important which backup storage will provide enough bandwidth? If you look at the capacity/storage ratio of the different LTO generations it looks like capacity is increasing faster then performance. So let’s say you’ll need 24h to fill the 1PB drive, then it would take about 12GB/s; make it 10h and performance increases to 29GB/s
You are absolutely right! without enough bandwidth such a tape would not make that much sense. But it could be used as a (very) long time retention media. When you write your yearly backups to it, it would probably be OK to run for a few days. And it is at least interesting for large hoster.
Improvements in VBR v11 
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