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I remember a gmail outage circa 2008 where they said they were restoring from tape, and people found the idea comically retrograde even back then. But I started
by hotpotamus 3y ago
I remember a gmail outage circa 2008 where they said they were restoring from tape, and people found the idea comically retrograde even back then. But I started at a company with large Commvault tape archives in 2011 and they mentioned that it was just more economical at scale for the workload (the backup team had some sweet gear that was apparently purchased with a kickback program on their LTO(4?) tape purchases; perhaps that assisted the engineering decisions) . However, by the end of that decade, they had migrated to mostly using large drive arrays with tape used only for offsite, so my impression was that tape was indeed a shrinking, niche method of data storage.
- throwaway29303 3y agoAn interesting Google Tech Talk video from 2013 about Google backing up the internet (and gmail): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNliOm9NtCM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNliOm9NtCM
- tpmx 3y agoFantastic talk, and I'm just 12 minutes in on a 1h14m video. Take the Cartesian product, in fact, of those factors. I want location isolation, isolation from application layer problems, isolation from storage layer problems, isolation from media failure. Edit: They do RAID4 on the tape level. 5 tapes, one of them the parity tape. When that fails: Reconstruction at sub-tape level. "We don't really have data loss." "We make the backups as complicated and take as long as they need. The restores have to be quick and automatic. Recovery should be stupid, fast and simple."