5 ms·

Holy that is a lot of storage in a very small amount of space. Besides the fact that I want one right now I am starting to wonder how much heat this will gener

by jtchang 11y ago

Holy that is a lot of storage in a very small amount of space. Besides the fact that I want one right now I am starting to wonder how much heat this will generate. A lot of 1 unit rack servers can fit about 8 2.5" drives. 128TB of storage in 1U is pretty crazy storage density. Everytime they reveal a larger capacity drive I just wonder what the backup strategy is going to be. Longer tapes?

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
pyre 11y ago
Redundant sets of drives... or high density backup tapes. Tape backups have come along with drive size increases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open#Generations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open#Generations looks like LTO-10 is planned to be 48TB per cartridge.
- dragontamer 11y ago
  LTO6 is current. LTO7 is "future". LTO8 may never happen, let alone LTO9 or LTO10 (If SSDs prove to be superior to tapes... investments will change for sure.) The chief benefit of LTO is that it still remains the cheapest and does in fact have huge sequential read/write speeds. Random read/write is even worse than discs but for backup purposes, sequential is king.
  - pixl97 11y ago
    SSDs may have issues with long term 'disuse', as in you unplug the drive and leave it on the shelf, data loss may occur. With most tapes you can put them in cold storage and they should last decades.
    - acdha 11y ago
      > With most tapes you can put them in cold storage and they should last decades. This is _hopefully_ true but operational history is so full of unpleasant surprises that I would hesitate to trust any type of storage which isn't regularly verified. With previous generations of LTO, a colleague had encountered fun failure modes like the media degrading rapidly (unrecoverable in less than a year) when a tape was stored on its side, which turned out to be an “everyone knows” fact not mentioned anywhere in the tape or drive documentation. A difference coworker had encountered some issues with a batch which had a defective lubricant causing the surface to break down over a couple years. One place we worked with had to carefully de-tune a new tape drive after learning that the old one had drifted out of alignment for at least a year before physically failing, which meant that most of their tapes were no longer readable by a drive in standard calibration. This is not to say that tape doesn't have a place - analogous failures happen for everything else and the cost-per-GB is appealing. I just don't think we actually have a toss-in-on-the-shelf storage media which can be assumed to work over a long term. You can address those issues with a regimented approach for rotation and mixing physical devices, media, and location but that increases the cost of adding a new storage technology into the mix since you need to develop that operational confidence for each class.
      - StillBored 11y ago
        "One place we worked with had to carefully de-tune a new tape drive after learning that the old one had drifted out of alignment for at least a year before physically failing, " This sounds like a story two decades old, LTO and all modern tape drives have servo tracks on the tapes.. AKA the drive realigns itself to the tape track on the fly as the media passes the head. If the drive cannot do this, you get track following check conditions during the write.
        acdha 11y ago
        That's certainly possible – I thought that was their first generation LTO system but it might have been the previous one which was being replaced. It was a decade ago so both would still have been in service at that time. The main point in mentioning it wasn't to say that tape is terrible but just that each unique class of hardware brings unique challenges which might not be obvious at first until you have a fair amount of operational time. (Thinking about the people who learned the hard way why RAID arrays should mix hard drives across batches and manufacturers)
    - njharman 11y ago
      Yeah but with drives and machines so cheap, most users can keep all their data live, on active drives. Actually on 3 or more drives geographically dispersed.
  - merb 11y ago
    We asked Dell for Backup Solutions a while ago, the only thing they told us was that more and more the LTO way of backing up date will decrease and people will focus on offsite cold disk coldstorage. However they forgot that there are customers which don't have many datacenters all over the place...
greedo 11y ago
Backup to disk; replicate to an offsite disk array for DR purposes. EDIT: I should have specified `backup to an SSD storage array.` Disk is just embedded in my brain.
gdickie 11y ago
For flash devices, power consumption / thermal dissipation is usually a small constant for the control logic, plus a very small amount per read, plus a small amount per (page) write. If you are limited to the write rate allowed by the SSD interface, then that will serve to limit the heat dissipation as well.
vegabook 11y ago
Tape?? You can get 6TB spinning HD for 300 bucks. Call it 12 grand for 1:1 redundancy on spinning disks @128TB. Spinning disk sequential throughput is more than big enough to do this overnight every day, and probably enough to backup almost live.
- Karunamon 11y ago
  Brand new LTO4 tapes can be had for about $30, and those go up to 1.6tb compressed, and LTO4 is old tech at this point.
  - letstryagain 11y ago
    So... 10 tapes per SSD if your data compresses well. I don't see that as practical at all.
    - Karunamon 11y ago
      You mean the tens of thousands of $$$ SSD in the topic? This can be had right here, right now. Upgrade it to modern tech (LTO6), and you get ~2.5TB/tape for about $60/tape. That's still the absolute best capacity-to-cost ratio for bulk storage that you'll get in 2015. LTO7 is just around the corner and that tops out at 6.5TB/tape.
      - vegabook 11y ago
        Nobody is arguing that tape doesn't provide the best capacity per dollar. However I get the sense that tape hasn't kept up with spinning disks, let alone SDDs (on Moore's law). It's just not the 50x factor it once was. More like 10x. Tape is on nobody's radar anymore, whereas as recently as 15 years ago it was still discussed by the mainstream IT commentariat. Gees I even remember PC Magazine recommending desktop users buy some DAT-based tape system. Now, tape is nowhere to be seen. And that's not really surprising to me when you think that a petabyte of highly responsive spinning disk array can be done for less than a 150 grand, hotswap redundancy included. That's for a superfast 2-d medium as opposed to an eternity-seek-time 1-d medium. Spinning disk is a medium which can be used for live redundancy, a crucial requirement in the internet age. Sure I think the NSA and GOOG might have need to archive exabytes onto tape. But that's not a mainstream market and for precisely 100% of hacker news readers, tape doesn't exist anymore.

by jtchang 11y ago

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

pyre 11y ago

Redundant sets of drives... or high density backup tapes. Tape backups have come along with drive size increases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open#Generations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open#Generations looks like LTO-10 is planned to be 48TB per cartridge.

dragontamer 11y ago
LTO6 is current. LTO7 is "future". LTO8 may never happen, let alone LTO9 or LTO10 (If SSDs prove to be superior to tapes... investments will change for sure.) The chief benefit of LTO is that it still remains the cheapest and does in fact have huge sequential read/write speeds. Random read/write is even worse than discs but for backup purposes, sequential is king.
- pixl97 11y ago
  SSDs may have issues with long term 'disuse', as in you unplug the drive and leave it on the shelf, data loss may occur. With most tapes you can put them in cold storage and they should last decades.
  - acdha 11y ago
    > With most tapes you can put them in cold storage and they should last decades. This is _hopefully_ true but operational history is so full of unpleasant surprises that I would hesitate to trust any type of storage which isn't regularly verified. With previous generations of LTO, a colleague had encountered fun failure modes like the media degrading rapidly (unrecoverable in less than a year) when a tape was stored on its side, which turned out to be an “everyone knows” fact not mentioned anywhere in the tape or drive documentation. A difference coworker had encountered some issues with a batch which had a defective lubricant causing the surface to break down over a couple years. One place we worked with had to carefully de-tune a new tape drive after learning that the old one had drifted out of alignment for at least a year before physically failing, which meant that most of their tapes were no longer readable by a drive in standard calibration. This is not to say that tape doesn't have a place - analogous failures happen for everything else and the cost-per-GB is appealing. I just don't think we actually have a toss-in-on-the-shelf storage media which can be assumed to work over a long term. You can address those issues with a regimented approach for rotation and mixing physical devices, media, and location but that increases the cost of adding a new storage technology into the mix since you need to develop that operational confidence for each class.
    - StillBored 11y ago
      "One place we worked with had to carefully de-tune a new tape drive after learning that the old one had drifted out of alignment for at least a year before physically failing, " This sounds like a story two decades old, LTO and all modern tape drives have servo tracks on the tapes.. AKA the drive realigns itself to the tape track on the fly as the media passes the head. If the drive cannot do this, you get track following check conditions during the write.
      - acdha 11y ago
        That's certainly possible – I thought that was their first generation LTO system but it might have been the previous one which was being replaced. It was a decade ago so both would still have been in service at that time. The main point in mentioning it wasn't to say that tape is terrible but just that each unique class of hardware brings unique challenges which might not be obvious at first until you have a fair amount of operational time. (Thinking about the people who learned the hard way why RAID arrays should mix hard drives across batches and manufacturers)
  - njharman 11y ago
    Yeah but with drives and machines so cheap, most users can keep all their data live, on active drives. Actually on 3 or more drives geographically dispersed.
- merb 11y ago
  We asked Dell for Backup Solutions a while ago, the only thing they told us was that more and more the LTO way of backing up date will decrease and people will focus on offsite cold disk coldstorage. However they forgot that there are customers which don't have many datacenters all over the place...

greedo 11y ago

Backup to disk; replicate to an offsite disk array for DR purposes. EDIT: I should have specified `backup to an SSD storage array.` Disk is just embedded in my brain.

gdickie 11y ago

For flash devices, power consumption / thermal dissipation is usually a small constant for the control logic, plus a very small amount per read, plus a small amount per (page) write. If you are limited to the write rate allowed by the SSD interface, then that will serve to limit the heat dissipation as well.

vegabook 11y ago

Tape?? You can get 6TB spinning HD for 300 bucks. Call it 12 grand for 1:1 redundancy on spinning disks @128TB. Spinning disk sequential throughput is more than big enough to do this overnight every day, and probably enough to backup almost live.

Karunamon 11y ago
Brand new LTO4 tapes can be had for about $30, and those go up to 1.6tb compressed, and LTO4 is old tech at this point.
- letstryagain 11y ago
  So... 10 tapes per SSD if your data compresses well. I don't see that as practical at all.
  - Karunamon 11y ago
    You mean the tens of thousands of $$$ SSD in the topic? This can be had right here, right now. Upgrade it to modern tech (LTO6), and you get ~2.5TB/tape for about $60/tape. That's still the absolute best capacity-to-cost ratio for bulk storage that you'll get in 2015. LTO7 is just around the corner and that tops out at 6.5TB/tape.
    - vegabook 11y ago
      Nobody is arguing that tape doesn't provide the best capacity per dollar. However I get the sense that tape hasn't kept up with spinning disks, let alone SDDs (on Moore's law). It's just not the 50x factor it once was. More like 10x. Tape is on nobody's radar anymore, whereas as recently as 15 years ago it was still discussed by the mainstream IT commentariat. Gees I even remember PC Magazine recommending desktop users buy some DAT-based tape system. Now, tape is nowhere to be seen. And that's not really surprising to me when you think that a petabyte of highly responsive spinning disk array can be done for less than a 150 grand, hotswap redundancy included. That's for a superfast 2-d medium as opposed to an eternity-seek-time 1-d medium. Spinning disk is a medium which can be used for live redundancy, a crucial requirement in the internet age. Sure I think the NSA and GOOG might have need to archive exabytes onto tape. But that's not a mainstream market and for precisely 100% of hacker news readers, tape doesn't exist anymore.