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To my knowledge, there is still no alternative to tape backups that comes close in terms of price per TB, size/capacity, resilience and safety/security. Even fo

To my knowledge, there is still no alternative to tape backups that comes close in terms of price per TB, size/capacity, resilience and safety/security. Even for a smaller or mid-sized business, if you want to make sure you have a copy of your files that you can keep 100% safe in a ransomware attack, or that you can get out in a jiff during or before a disaster, a small tape loader for 3-5k that can keep up to 8 tapes in automatic rotation will get you there and is money well spent. End of each day (or work week) you let the little robot inside the loader drop one tape drop into the "mail slot" and remove it, quick and easy. You now have a full offline backup that won't even be destroyed if you drop it (usually). I think, if every company did that, we'd see a lot less impact from ransomware attacks. (There are also WORM tapes for archival purposes that can't be overwritten, so if you don't want to remove tapes every so often, you can just use these.) The only thing that bugs me is that there is very little innovation in that field, it's basically one or two companies that manufacture tapes, drives and loaders and they have some clever practices that force you to upgrade every 5 years or so (new drives are only backward-compatible for one generation usually). The market is really geared extremely towards large enterprise only. The loaders have ancient web UIs from the 90s, the connection ports are also legacy or datacenter-only (SCSI usually), unfortunately you won't find a tape drive with USB3/Thunderbolt (I'd probably buy one for my home if they existed, I'm imagining them in a nice form factor similar to the old Zip Drives). I've never understood why tapes as storage and backup media aren't more popular. In practice, they really don't have many downsides that I have noticed. That whole technology is incredibly mature and therefore very reliable.

1996 6y ago
Can you recommend some tape backup? Ideally 1 to 4Tb/tape
- imagine99 6y ago
  Sure. I like the Tandberg NEOs StorageLoader for smaller deployments. It has slots for 8 tapes which it can automatically change and spit out as you want. It's pretty small as far as tape loaders go in that it only takes up a single rack unit (but it's still very deep, so you need a full-depth rack to properly store it). It's currently sold with drives for LTO generations 6 to 8 built in (the drive comes with it and is mounted in the back but it can be removed and you can upgrade it after some years; the loader itself basically only does the job of feeding the tapes from the magazines into the drive and unloading them again after, or putting them in the mailslot for removal). It's like a tiny robot living in your server rack which I think is neat. If you need to back up 4 TB of data, I recommend you go with LTO-7 tapes whose native capacity is 6 TB (uncompressed). LTO-6 only has 2.5 TB native capacity, so that might not be enough for you, also it's a bit old (LTO-6 was released in 2012). Note that you'll always find the compressed capacity in the marketing material but that's not very useful to calculate with unless you know the data that's to be backed up very well. Tape capacity usually doubles every four years (more or less) when a new generation is released (to an extent it's a scheme, but technical progress does play into it as well). Backwards compatibility is limited as I said, usually drives can read two generations back and write one generation). Due to some shenanigans this does not currently hold true for LTO-8 drives (the latest gen that's widely available), which can only read back LTO-7 and LTO-8 tapes but not the older LTO-6 tapes. So you have to remember that if you have very long archival cycles to consider (thinking in decades). LTO-8 is still somewhat more expensive, as it is the latest available gen. While LTO-9 was technically released late last year, I haven't seen it anywhere in the wild yet. They're pretty slow on the uptake, last generation it was the same and there weren't enough LTO-8 tapes for almost two years after "release" which is why they "invented" a stop-gap standard called LTO M-8, iirc, which used LTO-7 tapes but you could write 9 TB on them when using LTO-8 drives). Long story short, LTO-7 (drive and tape) is probably your best bet in terms of economics and availability (although, if you're sure you'll be fine with LTO-6 for the foreseeable future, you might be able to save maybe $1-2k that way). The NEOs series devices (incl. the NEOs StorageLoader) come with SAS or Fibre Channel interfaces, I recommend you use SAS, as it's cheaper and easier to get HBAs (adapter cards for your storage server) for SAS. If you use ESXi/vSphere, get an HBA that's on the compatibility list and you can pass it through to a VM to host the backup software on there and control the storage loader (not officially supported by all companies but works very well in my experience). You do need a server to "control" and "feed" the StorageLoader and this can be pretty much anything you can put a SAS card in (as I said, incl. a VM). I recommend you combine it with Veeam Backup & Replication which is the best backup software currently out there imo, works beautifully with VMs and a diverse range of endpoints and natively supports backing up on a tape loader as the ultimate target (you can get creative there, do hourly backups to disk and send one batch to tape every evening for example). One caveat: Tapes must be fed at constant speed while writing or they do something called "shoe-shining" which isn't good for the longevity of the tape. You'd have to look up the exact numbers but feeding the tape directly over 1 Gbit Ethernet via iSCSI from a backup appliance with the server as a proxy... that's probably going to be too slow (if you use Veeam, it will show you what the bottleneck is during the backup process). 10 Gbit would be better but you can also fill the storage server with a few TBs of HDDs, let the agents backup there directly and then go from there to tape which would solve any speed problems and will be sufficient for small to medium-sized setups. I recommend you combine that with ReFS if you run Windows Server 2019 (which is trippy but can save a lot of space). You can fill LTO-7 tapes with a max. speed of 300 MB/s uncompressed, which means backing up your 2 TB would take less than 2 hours. If your files compress well and your backup source can handle it, write speeds may increase up to 750 MB/s, so you will be that much faster. The price you're looking at for the NEOs is around $4k. For the SAS HBA you can calculate about $200, add the cables and a Veeam license and a few tapes to get you started (LTO-7 tapes can be had for around $50 currently, doesn't matter which brand you buy) and you're at less than $5k all-in, if a storage server or VM host already exists. That's not too bad for total peace of mind and the level of flexibility and safety that tape backup gives you. You should get yourself a cleaning cartridge, too, as this is a highly mechanical technology and the drive needs cleaning cycle every once in a while (if you keep it in the storage loader it will use it on its own when necessary). If you keep a few tapes in rotation (which I recommend), you'll find that some SSDs or HDDs in your org will die on you before you need to replace a tape for the first time. So the value for money is very good. You can reuse a tape many times (up to 250 full rewrites) and if you fully encrypt all your backups (which of course you do), you can sell on your used tapes later, there are companies who buy them up, so you don't have to throw them out (you can degauss them but then they're usually trash). However, I strongly recommend that you regularly physically remove the tapes from the loader (even if you have one with 48 or more slots), as not doing so negates one of the major advantages of tape which is offline backup and off-site storage (= fully disaster- and ransomware-proof without much additional thought). Also, keep your storage server secure as the baddies are wising up to this and I know at least one recent case where they got into the storage server and issued commands from there to the tape loader to load all tapes from its magazine and overwrite them one by one (the failure here is obviously more than a technical one). Again, you can use WORM tapes (write once, read many) to prevent that also but imo that's a waste of tape. As for the loader and drive themselves, they are mechanical, as I said, but typically very stable and come with long warranties. I've seen tape loaders run for well over a decade without major issues (most are replaced or upgraded before they break). You have to treat them well though, so data-center climate is very much their natural habitat (no vibrations or movement, not too much or too little humidity, not too much heat, no dust or corrosive climate etc.). If space is at a premium and you don't have a rack available (e.g. at a tiny branch office), there are external LTO drives as well (without a tape loader). These are usually in the 5.25 form factor (like those old CD drives) and function not unlike old floppy drives, you pop in a single tape, write on it, pop it out again. You can technically connect these to your workstation directly. You still need an SAS interface though, because as I said, alas I am not aware of one with a more modern interface like Thunderbolt. So connecting one to a laptop is pretty much impossible (there are adapters out there but very expensive and I've no idea if they work). Bottom line, I would not recommend you get one of these. They have none of the convenience of the a tape loader where you can just drop in a handful of tapes and forget about them for a while, as they can only handle the one tape at a time (it's really just a simple drive). And they are severely overpriced for that. You can have a look at the HP StoreEver 15000 (exists as an internal or external device) which isn't bad but clocks in at $3.5k - for just $500 more you can get the full NEOs incl. drive, so it really doesn't make much sense unless you can get one cheap/used (you can find the LTO-6 version for around $1500). Right. I hope that "little" overview helps you in some way :-)
  - 1996 6y ago
    It does, thanks a lot! I'll look at the price of used LTO-6 or 7 - a used 5 1/4 unit could easily go in a server that has a LSI 9223 8i SAS with only 4 drives connected. (so the second SFF 8087 is empty). If not, a NEO will be great! About Veem, do I absolutely need it? Can't I just tar/untar or zfs send to the tape?
    - imagine99 6y ago
      You don't need Veeam of course but you should definitely try it out if you really want to manage your backups properly. It works really well and is pretty sleek, also for restore processs and when working with VMs or endpoints. You should certainly use it instead of any other commercial backup software like BackupExec (most of which are just... bad in comparison). Veeam offers a free Windows agent but I don't think that one works with tape drives (I might be wrong, especially in combination with LTFS, see below). You can't generally use tape like a USB stick, that is, write and delete files to and from it willy-nilly ;-) As tape is linear, that would require a lot of going back and forth. Imagine random I/O when you can just go forward or backward with the read head: That's annoying and slow at best, at worst it could destroy the tape or machine quickly. HOWEVER: They have come up with something called the "Linear Tape File System" (LTFS) which does in fact allow you to access a tape in a way that looks (from the outside at least) pretty similar to any external storage device. In fact, sustained read speeds can be much faster even than traditional storage in the right circumstances. There are some tricks they use, obviously, to get around the physical limitations I mentioned above. One of them is, I believe, that space is not freed up if you delete a file (it is simply marked as deleted in meta data - but that's the "modern way" to delete things anyway, right? :-D). Also, your drive has to support it and the tape also has to be formatted in a specific way. It might only work with new tapes (again, I might be wrong or this may have changed). I've actually never used LTFS in production, so I can't help you with the details or tell you what this means for the lifespan of the tape if you use it in this fashion. I also don't know what software you need to use this under Linux. Feel free to report back if you go down this route, I'd be curious to hear whether you get it to work and whether you like it for everyday use.

1996 6y ago

Can you recommend some tape backup? Ideally 1 to 4Tb/tape

imagine99 6y ago
Sure. I like the Tandberg NEOs StorageLoader for smaller deployments. It has slots for 8 tapes which it can automatically change and spit out as you want. It's pretty small as far as tape loaders go in that it only takes up a single rack unit (but it's still very deep, so you need a full-depth rack to properly store it). It's currently sold with drives for LTO generations 6 to 8 built in (the drive comes with it and is mounted in the back but it can be removed and you can upgrade it after some years; the loader itself basically only does the job of feeding the tapes from the magazines into the drive and unloading them again after, or putting them in the mailslot for removal). It's like a tiny robot living in your server rack which I think is neat. If you need to back up 4 TB of data, I recommend you go with LTO-7 tapes whose native capacity is 6 TB (uncompressed). LTO-6 only has 2.5 TB native capacity, so that might not be enough for you, also it's a bit old (LTO-6 was released in 2012). Note that you'll always find the compressed capacity in the marketing material but that's not very useful to calculate with unless you know the data that's to be backed up very well. Tape capacity usually doubles every four years (more or less) when a new generation is released (to an extent it's a scheme, but technical progress does play into it as well). Backwards compatibility is limited as I said, usually drives can read two generations back and write one generation). Due to some shenanigans this does not currently hold true for LTO-8 drives (the latest gen that's widely available), which can only read back LTO-7 and LTO-8 tapes but not the older LTO-6 tapes. So you have to remember that if you have very long archival cycles to consider (thinking in decades). LTO-8 is still somewhat more expensive, as it is the latest available gen. While LTO-9 was technically released late last year, I haven't seen it anywhere in the wild yet. They're pretty slow on the uptake, last generation it was the same and there weren't enough LTO-8 tapes for almost two years after "release" which is why they "invented" a stop-gap standard called LTO M-8, iirc, which used LTO-7 tapes but you could write 9 TB on them when using LTO-8 drives). Long story short, LTO-7 (drive and tape) is probably your best bet in terms of economics and availability (although, if you're sure you'll be fine with LTO-6 for the foreseeable future, you might be able to save maybe $1-2k that way). The NEOs series devices (incl. the NEOs StorageLoader) come with SAS or Fibre Channel interfaces, I recommend you use SAS, as it's cheaper and easier to get HBAs (adapter cards for your storage server) for SAS. If you use ESXi/vSphere, get an HBA that's on the compatibility list and you can pass it through to a VM to host the backup software on there and control the storage loader (not officially supported by all companies but works very well in my experience). You do need a server to "control" and "feed" the StorageLoader and this can be pretty much anything you can put a SAS card in (as I said, incl. a VM). I recommend you combine it with Veeam Backup & Replication which is the best backup software currently out there imo, works beautifully with VMs and a diverse range of endpoints and natively supports backing up on a tape loader as the ultimate target (you can get creative there, do hourly backups to disk and send one batch to tape every evening for example). One caveat: Tapes must be fed at constant speed while writing or they do something called "shoe-shining" which isn't good for the longevity of the tape. You'd have to look up the exact numbers but feeding the tape directly over 1 Gbit Ethernet via iSCSI from a backup appliance with the server as a proxy... that's probably going to be too slow (if you use Veeam, it will show you what the bottleneck is during the backup process). 10 Gbit would be better but you can also fill the storage server with a few TBs of HDDs, let the agents backup there directly and then go from there to tape which would solve any speed problems and will be sufficient for small to medium-sized setups. I recommend you combine that with ReFS if you run Windows Server 2019 (which is trippy but can save a lot of space). You can fill LTO-7 tapes with a max. speed of 300 MB/s uncompressed, which means backing up your 2 TB would take less than 2 hours. If your files compress well and your backup source can handle it, write speeds may increase up to 750 MB/s, so you will be that much faster. The price you're looking at for the NEOs is around $4k. For the SAS HBA you can calculate about $200, add the cables and a Veeam license and a few tapes to get you started (LTO-7 tapes can be had for around $50 currently, doesn't matter which brand you buy) and you're at less than $5k all-in, if a storage server or VM host already exists. That's not too bad for total peace of mind and the level of flexibility and safety that tape backup gives you. You should get yourself a cleaning cartridge, too, as this is a highly mechanical technology and the drive needs cleaning cycle every once in a while (if you keep it in the storage loader it will use it on its own when necessary). If you keep a few tapes in rotation (which I recommend), you'll find that some SSDs or HDDs in your org will die on you before you need to replace a tape for the first time. So the value for money is very good. You can reuse a tape many times (up to 250 full rewrites) and if you fully encrypt all your backups (which of course you do), you can sell on your used tapes later, there are companies who buy them up, so you don't have to throw them out (you can degauss them but then they're usually trash). However, I strongly recommend that you regularly physically remove the tapes from the loader (even if you have one with 48 or more slots), as not doing so negates one of the major advantages of tape which is offline backup and off-site storage (= fully disaster- and ransomware-proof without much additional thought). Also, keep your storage server secure as the baddies are wising up to this and I know at least one recent case where they got into the storage server and issued commands from there to the tape loader to load all tapes from its magazine and overwrite them one by one (the failure here is obviously more than a technical one). Again, you can use WORM tapes (write once, read many) to prevent that also but imo that's a waste of tape. As for the loader and drive themselves, they are mechanical, as I said, but typically very stable and come with long warranties. I've seen tape loaders run for well over a decade without major issues (most are replaced or upgraded before they break). You have to treat them well though, so data-center climate is very much their natural habitat (no vibrations or movement, not too much or too little humidity, not too much heat, no dust or corrosive climate etc.). If space is at a premium and you don't have a rack available (e.g. at a tiny branch office), there are external LTO drives as well (without a tape loader). These are usually in the 5.25 form factor (like those old CD drives) and function not unlike old floppy drives, you pop in a single tape, write on it, pop it out again. You can technically connect these to your workstation directly. You still need an SAS interface though, because as I said, alas I am not aware of one with a more modern interface like Thunderbolt. So connecting one to a laptop is pretty much impossible (there are adapters out there but very expensive and I've no idea if they work). Bottom line, I would not recommend you get one of these. They have none of the convenience of the a tape loader where you can just drop in a handful of tapes and forget about them for a while, as they can only handle the one tape at a time (it's really just a simple drive). And they are severely overpriced for that. You can have a look at the HP StoreEver 15000 (exists as an internal or external device) which isn't bad but clocks in at $3.5k - for just $500 more you can get the full NEOs incl. drive, so it really doesn't make much sense unless you can get one cheap/used (you can find the LTO-6 version for around $1500). Right. I hope that "little" overview helps you in some way :-)
- 1996 6y ago
  It does, thanks a lot! I'll look at the price of used LTO-6 or 7 - a used 5 1/4 unit could easily go in a server that has a LSI 9223 8i SAS with only 4 drives connected. (so the second SFF 8087 is empty). If not, a NEO will be great! About Veem, do I absolutely need it? Can't I just tar/untar or zfs send to the tape?
  - imagine99 6y ago
    You don't need Veeam of course but you should definitely try it out if you really want to manage your backups properly. It works really well and is pretty sleek, also for restore processs and when working with VMs or endpoints. You should certainly use it instead of any other commercial backup software like BackupExec (most of which are just... bad in comparison). Veeam offers a free Windows agent but I don't think that one works with tape drives (I might be wrong, especially in combination with LTFS, see below). You can't generally use tape like a USB stick, that is, write and delete files to and from it willy-nilly ;-) As tape is linear, that would require a lot of going back and forth. Imagine random I/O when you can just go forward or backward with the read head: That's annoying and slow at best, at worst it could destroy the tape or machine quickly. HOWEVER: They have come up with something called the "Linear Tape File System" (LTFS) which does in fact allow you to access a tape in a way that looks (from the outside at least) pretty similar to any external storage device. In fact, sustained read speeds can be much faster even than traditional storage in the right circumstances. There are some tricks they use, obviously, to get around the physical limitations I mentioned above. One of them is, I believe, that space is not freed up if you delete a file (it is simply marked as deleted in meta data - but that's the "modern way" to delete things anyway, right? :-D). Also, your drive has to support it and the tape also has to be formatted in a specific way. It might only work with new tapes (again, I might be wrong or this may have changed). I've actually never used LTFS in production, so I can't help you with the details or tell you what this means for the lifespan of the tape if you use it in this fashion. I also don't know what software you need to use this under Linux. Feel free to report back if you go down this route, I'd be curious to hear whether you get it to work and whether you like it for everyday use.