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Friday, October 19. 2012

Whenever i hear "Oh ... tape is dead ... everything will be saved in the cloud", i wan't to answer "Yeah, sure, you don't need power plants as well because at at your home the electrical power comes from the wall sockets". Don't know what those people thinking how those providers are doing backup,restore and recovery.

For this discussions there is a nice data point: Google published a nice video and 65 seconds in video the device looks like a large tape library to me and they are saying: "We store another copy of the most important data on digital tapes". There they are again: Tapes.

On a related note, the Register writes about a rumor "Insider 'fesses up: Amazon's Glacier cloud is made of ... TAPE". By the way, when Glacier was announced, a lot of news outlets said "Nail into the coffin of tape". Well ... just to start : Would only believe it when you show me an internet connection north of several hundreds of megabytes per second sustained. There are several reasons why such a service is no competition for tapes as a backup,restore, recovery mechanism as well as for archiving for people

(However i see really a market for such a service: Rescuing your life when you have to fulfill on the hardest SLA: When you have recover photos important to your significant other, photos you have just deleted. Waiting a little bit is nothing then, just getting the photos back is important

)

PS: This "additional copy on tape" thing sounds familiar to me. Back at my former employee Canbox in 2000 i've planed implemented together with Sun a hierarchical storage management for the mail store. I used a slightly modified IMAP daemon to prevent a staging storm (metadata was backuped differently). One copy on disk (of course mirrored ... on Photon arrays), two copies on tapes in a STK 9310 aka Powderhorn I coined the phrase at that time "You can do anything with a user, but you are not allowed to loose a single mail of her or him" and to live up to this the mail system was planed that way. Oh god, i'm already that old that i'm telling old stories from the trenches

Posted by Joerg Moellenkamp in English, Technology, The IT Business at 20:29 | Comments (6) | Trackbacks (0)

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and if you look closer at the tape libs: http://goo.gl/JRsZj I see STK

#1 holzi on 2012-10-20 09:21 (Reply)

Interesting share :
A cardboard sign "FORT G TAPE" right of the big lightgreen ANDROID mascotte; and a trolley with fivepacks on top of what I think might be cleaning cartrdiges LTO? (The gray things on top http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open)

Thanks

#1.1 Michiel on 2012-10-21 17:18 (Reply)

Funny.. they've taken the effort to blur out the Sun logo - but the color alone tells us it's a Sun (and ONLY Sun, not Sun/Oracle).. and the front is characteristic enough to identify it as a StorageTek SL8500.
Yes, the Googlers seem to have a hand for good hardware..

#1.2 Woo (Homepage) on 2012-11-04 14:11 (Reply)

On a side note: I'd love to see one or a few of the old Powderhorns in action some day.. somehow the silo storage robotics looks much more interesting than the newer linear libraries.

#1.2.1 Woo (Homepage) on 2012-11-04 14:22 (Reply)

When people say "Tape is expensive" I ask them how much it would cost to store a petabyte of data in their preferred solution; for seven years?

#2 mdb on 2012-10-22 17:45 (Reply)

yeah looks like nice SL8500... http://www.google.com/about/datacenters/gallery/#/all/57 only worries my that the service required light is on

speaking of powderhorns... that reminds me of the little timberwolf i had "in my office" for 7 years... those were the days...

#3 berny on 2012-11-04 22:43 (Reply)

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