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It depends on the scale, doesn't it? My issue with tape is that unless your operation is big enough to justify a robotic tape library as a budget line item wit

It depends on the scale, doesn't it? My issue with tape is that unless your operation is big enough to justify a robotic tape library as a budget line item with support contracts and all, then you're down to paying someone (or eating the cost yourself) to physically swap tapes which is much more expensive and boring than deploying a ZFS server with gobs of disk that once configured, just sits in the rack and does its job quietly.

Karunamon 3y ago
More realistically you are deploying two of the servers; redundancy is not backup. And now you have two servers to administer. The whole point of something like tape is having an off-line copy of your data, ideally in a separate physical location. A second server with a bunch of disk in the same location connected to the same network isn't that, and will not save you from ransomware or natural disaster.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- rbanffy 3y ago
  > And now you have two servers to administer. If you use even crude tools such as clusterssh, managing a bunch of machines isn’t linearly harder than managing one. While tape renders itself easily to be offline storage (it’s offline as soon as you eject it after all), you can have that with remote servers that pull data to back it up instead of receiving pushed data. If no server can push data to any other server, only pull from them, a ransomware attack becomes a lot harder. Also, while tape in a warehouse (or on the desk) is offline, tapes in the robot are no more difficult to destroy than hard disks. They are just slower.
eschneider 3y ago
Yeah, but that ZFS server is likely in the same rack that's going to get knocked out when the data center gets sucked into a tornado, or whatever. Weather it makes sense to have someone on staff swapping tapes, rotating backups, shipping them offsite, and keeping records of what exactly is where not to mention handling AND TESTING restores really depends on what your data's worth. For most places, it's cheap insurance.
- charcircuit 3y ago
  Put an online backup in a another location then.
  - throw0101c 3y ago
    > Put an online backup in a another location then. And hope your online backup doesn't get hit by the same group/malware that took out your primary production system. Offline backups help with certain types of risks.
    - rubatuga 3y ago
      You can use zfs send which is a append only operation
      - throw0101c 3y ago
        > You can use zfs send which is a append only operation It's not about how the data gets there, it's the fact that the system is online and hackable just like any other system. Good luck wiping offline tapes (Mr. Robot not withstanding).
mbreese 3y ago
I think you’re dead on. I smaller scales, it’s cheaper just to keep more disks running. But once you get to scale, tape is great for archival work. The trick I’ve always found is to figure out where you are on that inflection point. And it’s hard. Is 1PB enough to justify tape? (Which seems like a crazy question to me - I remember having megabyte sized tapes).
- klodolph 3y ago
  When I did the calculations a few years ago, break-even was somewhere around 150 TB, and I don’t think it’s changed too much since then. This is just considering the cost of drives and media. Obviously, the real inflection point is going to be different depending on all sorts of factors that may be specific to your situation and your priorities. Usability isn’t something you can ignore, but it’s not like hard drives are perfect either—do you buy a big NAS / SAN setup and plug drives into it? Will it get full? And tape has the advantage that it’s completely immune, out of the box, to ransomware. I think there are four cases that really scream for tape. 1. Data hoarders, who just want to store as much data as possible for the cost. There’s an r/DataHoarder subreddit if you’re curious about these people. 2. Archivists, who want to store lots of data long-term. Tape is a lot easier to store. I recommend that archivists standardize on a specific generation of tape for as long as possible and don’t mix generations (don’t mix LTO4 and LTO5, for example, despite the fact that the drives are advertised as working with both). 3. Companies with recordkeeping requirements, like SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley). Tape is just really good for that. It has a way of surviving problems in your IT department. 4. Companies with enough data that they can put a line-item on the budget for backups, and justify the operational cost of tape—support contracts, keeping staff on hand who know how to use tape, that kind of thing. Of these, the data hoarders are going to use the 150 TB break-even point just because they want as much data as possible. Everybody else is going to make decisions based on other factors, like staffing or compliance. There are a number of gotchas, like problems with mixing tape generations, the prospect of using robotic tape libraries, and support contracts, that make the tradeoff much more nuanced.
  - adrian_b 3y ago
    Yes, considering the additional cost of a tape drive versus the price difference per stored TB between tapes and HDDs gives an intersection point somewhere between 100 TB and 300 TB. Taking into account that for long term archiving it is necessary to store 2 or 3 copies of the data reduces proportionally the threshold above which tape is preferable. The storage cost per TB includes not only the purchase price but also the lifetime of the media, e.g. a HDD model with a warranty of 2 years cannot be trusted to store data for a longer time. Tape is guaranteed for 30 years, but the storage time is normally reduced to about 10 years by the risk that the corresponding tape drives may become obsolete.
klodolph 3y ago
There are tape libraries as small as 3U with 25 slots. That’s a capacity of only 300 TB with LTO-8. It’s not hard to justify if you’re working with stuff like video.
KaiserPro 3y ago
100% Its also the software to run the blasted thing as well. As soon as you get into tape shit get's enterprise-y real quick. There are opensource tools to manage tape collections, but its not fun. LTO tape libraries are fairly cheap to pick up second hand, its the cost of getting the newer drives that hurts.
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  Frequently there have been problems getting the tapes to go with newer drives because of patent wars too.
2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
> just sits in the rack and does its job quietly Oh does it? You'll never be forced to update or maintain that configuration due to shifting sands of company policy, infra, or CVEs?

Karunamon 3y ago

More realistically you are deploying two of the servers; redundancy is not backup. And now you have two servers to administer. The whole point of something like tape is having an off-line copy of your data, ideally in a separate physical location. A second server with a bunch of disk in the same location connected to the same network isn't that, and will not save you from ransomware or natural disaster.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
rbanffy 3y ago
> And now you have two servers to administer. If you use even crude tools such as clusterssh, managing a bunch of machines isn’t linearly harder than managing one. While tape renders itself easily to be offline storage (it’s offline as soon as you eject it after all), you can have that with remote servers that pull data to back it up instead of receiving pushed data. If no server can push data to any other server, only pull from them, a ransomware attack becomes a lot harder. Also, while tape in a warehouse (or on the desk) is offline, tapes in the robot are no more difficult to destroy than hard disks. They are just slower.

eschneider 3y ago

Yeah, but that ZFS server is likely in the same rack that's going to get knocked out when the data center gets sucked into a tornado, or whatever. Weather it makes sense to have someone on staff swapping tapes, rotating backups, shipping them offsite, and keeping records of what exactly is where not to mention handling AND TESTING restores really depends on what your data's worth. For most places, it's cheap insurance.

charcircuit 3y ago
Put an online backup in a another location then.
- throw0101c 3y ago
  > Put an online backup in a another location then. And hope your online backup doesn't get hit by the same group/malware that took out your primary production system. Offline backups help with certain types of risks.
  - rubatuga 3y ago
    You can use zfs send which is a append only operation
    - throw0101c 3y ago
      > You can use zfs send which is a append only operation It's not about how the data gets there, it's the fact that the system is online and hackable just like any other system. Good luck wiping offline tapes (Mr. Robot not withstanding).

mbreese 3y ago

I think you’re dead on. I smaller scales, it’s cheaper just to keep more disks running. But once you get to scale, tape is great for archival work. The trick I’ve always found is to figure out where you are on that inflection point. And it’s hard. Is 1PB enough to justify tape? (Which seems like a crazy question to me - I remember having megabyte sized tapes).

klodolph 3y ago
When I did the calculations a few years ago, break-even was somewhere around 150 TB, and I don’t think it’s changed too much since then. This is just considering the cost of drives and media. Obviously, the real inflection point is going to be different depending on all sorts of factors that may be specific to your situation and your priorities. Usability isn’t something you can ignore, but it’s not like hard drives are perfect either—do you buy a big NAS / SAN setup and plug drives into it? Will it get full? And tape has the advantage that it’s completely immune, out of the box, to ransomware. I think there are four cases that really scream for tape. 1. Data hoarders, who just want to store as much data as possible for the cost. There’s an r/DataHoarder subreddit if you’re curious about these people. 2. Archivists, who want to store lots of data long-term. Tape is a lot easier to store. I recommend that archivists standardize on a specific generation of tape for as long as possible and don’t mix generations (don’t mix LTO4 and LTO5, for example, despite the fact that the drives are advertised as working with both). 3. Companies with recordkeeping requirements, like SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley). Tape is just really good for that. It has a way of surviving problems in your IT department. 4. Companies with enough data that they can put a line-item on the budget for backups, and justify the operational cost of tape—support contracts, keeping staff on hand who know how to use tape, that kind of thing. Of these, the data hoarders are going to use the 150 TB break-even point just because they want as much data as possible. Everybody else is going to make decisions based on other factors, like staffing or compliance. There are a number of gotchas, like problems with mixing tape generations, the prospect of using robotic tape libraries, and support contracts, that make the tradeoff much more nuanced.
- adrian_b 3y ago
  Yes, considering the additional cost of a tape drive versus the price difference per stored TB between tapes and HDDs gives an intersection point somewhere between 100 TB and 300 TB. Taking into account that for long term archiving it is necessary to store 2 or 3 copies of the data reduces proportionally the threshold above which tape is preferable. The storage cost per TB includes not only the purchase price but also the lifetime of the media, e.g. a HDD model with a warranty of 2 years cannot be trusted to store data for a longer time. Tape is guaranteed for 30 years, but the storage time is normally reduced to about 10 years by the risk that the corresponding tape drives may become obsolete.

klodolph 3y ago

There are tape libraries as small as 3U with 25 slots. That’s a capacity of only 300 TB with LTO-8. It’s not hard to justify if you’re working with stuff like video.

KaiserPro 3y ago

100% Its also the software to run the blasted thing as well. As soon as you get into tape shit get's enterprise-y real quick. There are opensource tools to manage tape collections, but its not fun. LTO tape libraries are fairly cheap to pick up second hand, its the cost of getting the newer drives that hurts.

PaulHoule 3y ago
Frequently there have been problems getting the tapes to go with newer drives because of patent wars too.

2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago

> just sits in the rack and does its job quietly Oh does it? You'll never be forced to update or maintain that configuration due to shifting sands of company policy, infra, or CVEs?