Interesting

Yes, I think a tiering storage infrastructure is very useful today. There is a great part of cold data which is accessed infrequently, so it can be moved to cold storage with higher access times and less power consumption.

As the energy prices are rising significantly at the moment and the carbon emission - and reduction - gets more and more important, tape can give a big contribution to reduce cost and to reduce emissions.

Good point! In times like these, each carbon reduction is highly welcome - every little helps!

I foresee Tape being around for a really really long time. Such a versatile medium and the bonus of taking it offline, storing it for long periods of time without worrying too much if the data will be accessible years down the line.

Yes, the manufactures give a duration of the tapes of 10 years now.
So, the duration has doubled since 2005 or so...

As well capacity has increased tremendously as well over the years too so makes it a good choice depending on the applicable use case.

Tape is always a great solution, and automatic switching tapes leave no more excuses to not to use them.

Yes, after some initial invest it is the least costly storage for infrequently accessed data.

And the library mechanic does not give many problems nowadays, too.

Unfortunately in Italy aren’t always viewed favorably… I think because it’s mistakenly assiociated to “obsolete technology”. Idk around the world if it’s different.

Many companies are trying to mark tape as obsolete technology in order to sell their solutions.

And for many usecases this is correct. But for cold data or long retention times tape is the right solution. Object storage is more expensive over time...

Agreed and why we came out with some cold storage S3/Tape solutions to sell to our customers. 

Yes, these are a very interessant solution. I am in the process of deploying them for some of our customers, too

Hi All

I see the point of long retention, less carbon emissions, etc.
But my personal experience since now, is that keeping things in tapes, like LTO 3, LTO 5, always was a big headache, the dreamed idea of long retention was awesome, but time passed and when needed to recover something, the latest LTO reader was incompatible, so you needed to keep one robot or tape reader for those old ones, or migrate the data to a newer LTO version… after all this, we decided to run a deduplicated storage instead of a tape libraries.

This is a very personal decision, also depends on the data, time to access, bussines criticality, etc.

I don't blame to tapes, I just had enough “bad moments” with them to not trust them anymore.

But, yeah! good point guys.

cheers.

Ok… LTO-3 and LTO-5 had a guaranteed durability of 5 years only anyway. So, migration to new media after two generations was - and is - a good idea in general.

Would you trust a disk system for 10 or more years without copying your data?

For sure.

This was only my personal experience over the years.
The best practices say that you must copy from old to new, but in the end, I don't know many places where they do it so, most of them leave the tapes in a fire safe, and pray for not have to use them, LOL.

I did the change to a deduplicated appliance, and i backup it every month and take it out of my office, and every time we change that storage, the data continues but the virtual appliance still live there, so for me is much easier, and upgrading the appliance, etc, its just software and the time to do it its easier for me to find, and also easier to justify for time consuming or task priority.

Just my point of view, but yes, I agree that is an awesome solution, but like all of them, it has some gaps, pros and cons.

also many companies evaluate this with time consumption, not data security or durability.

thanks!
keep in track guys!

I've never seen it from this point, but sounds like a real advantage of tape compared to disk storage.

@JMeixner I've read somewhere about 30 years durability for tape. Does it really depend on the LTO standard?

As far as I know, yes. Former generations had 5 years guaranteed durability, LTO-9 has 10 years.

I have seen more than 10 years with the IBM Jaguar tapes only. But these are a little bit more expensive than LTO…

In reality most tapes are readable more than the 5 or 10 years, if stored cool and dry… The problem is most - like @HunterLF  said - that the drives are exchanged at some point in time. And they can read only two (or one in case of Gen8) geberation backwards.

Interesting article @JMeixner , now i’m wondering what about recycling materials vs HDD.