Google teams with Iron Mountain for LTO-to-cloud migration

Google and Iron Mountain are trying to hasten the never-quite-imminent death of tape as a storage medium with an LTO-to-cloud migration collaboration. LTO – linear tape open for those among you not enamoured of rusty ribbons – is a standard tape format that counts IBM, HP and Quantum among its backers. A single seventh- …

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's see...

... Backing up your company's Terabytes of sensitive commercial data across a slow comms link to a remote place where only Google and their paying customers can access it, possibly to the exclusion of yourselves if your comms link were to go down.

What could possibly go wrong ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Let's see...

Yup, that was my first thought too. Data on tape: at rest, but relatively secure (provided nobody steals the tape). Data at Google: open to the world. You may not want that..

[rvandolson]

Re: Let's see...

Hah, yep. We do LTFS on site for just this reason. Considered cloud, but when the users need the data back they don't want to wait very long, and paying for a 5+Gbps connection to whereever chews away at all your "savings" pretty quickly.

[PleebSmasher]

"The death of tape has been predicted a zillion times, but it seems that death will happen in the year N where N is this year plus 1."

Yes, and the Google Cloud will never lose your data on accident in the year N + 1.

[Joerg]

So any business would trash its precious reliable LTO drives and tapes to store all its most precious and confidential data on a remote slow cloud service offered by Google which is using LTO drives and tapes in its own data center anyway...

[Anonymous Coward]

Iron Mountain + Google? Sure.

I would not trust Iron Mountain with an empty 3.5" diskette, much less with running a storage facility of any sort.

Unless, of course, I need something 'special' from them.

Just look up "Iron Mountain fire" or "Iron Mountain arson" with any search engine and you'll get just a hint of just how much reliability they can be accounted for.

Quie a few 'incidents' worlwide. Not to mention the solid suspicions of being involved in shady cover up operations for banks, financial institutions and other interesting concerns in need of 'missing/burnt/lost' documentation.

Team that up with Google and it's the taking of one more step into the void.

Anon because ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, about that Iron Mountain/Google "business"

Is this going to be another one of those "let's try it and then dump it when it isn't profitable" products?

IM has some history here, and we all know how Google loves to jettison products whenever they feel like it.

Buyer beware.

http://wikibon.org/wiki/v/Iron_Mountain_Sheds_Digital_Assets_to_Better_Focus_on_Core_Business,_Customer_Process_and_Governance_Requirements

[Anonymous Coward]

"tape is dead"

Unless of course you count that Google still backs its datacenters up on tape.

Though admittedly tape vendors aren't too happy with Google being an outright majority of their sales these days.

[Roland_Bavington]

Re: "tape is dead"

Could you cite your source for Google being the majority of sales these days. I work in tape storage and I don't believe it is anywhere near true.

[hellwig]

Fat Pipes

Is point to point connectivity setup where you can order bandwidth on demand? I ask because, once your archival data is in the cloud, how do you get it out? If you upload 50TB of data to Nearline, is it really cheaper to pay IronMountain for the upload, Google for uploads and monthly fees, AND keep your own 10gbps connection around on the off chance you'll need to download your archival data eventually, as opposed to running your own onsite archival system?

Otherwise, will you be paying IronMountain to download your data over THEIR fat pipe, onto LTO, and then mail that tape to you?

This is a problem in general with archival storage. You don't plan to need to retrieve it, but what happens when you do? I can't imagine your average company has that much extra bandwidth at any given point.

[BradJensen3]

Re: Fat Pipes

If you have 10 gbps you don't need Iron Mountain to send things to Google for you.

The more typical things is to use a local virtual tape device and deduplication with replication. Most restores will be from recent backups that are still on the local device. If your backups are highly deduplicated it reduces the restore bandwidth needed significantly.

[Anonymous Coward]

Filter the tape enough times and you won't have to shred it.

When the time comes to shred all the old tape there better be a good way to save all the important data. Upload, filter, save.

[macentric1]

Sounds like you have stock in a cloud storage provider!

Disclaimer: I sell a lot of tape archive as well as cloud storage.

Most customers can not afford the bandwidth to move TB or PB into the cloud. Look at the TCO and duration of seeding PB of data to the cloud. Look at the costs of recovering your data. A blended model of tape onsite and tape in the cloud is workable but don't expect to move TB of day to the cloud in a day without 10s of Gbs of bandwidth.

You may say Glacier is cheap. It's tape in the cloud. Look into how much it costs to recover that data and how quickly you need it. A single Glacier restore can cost many customers more than they pay in a month to store the data. LTO7 provides up to 300MBs of bandwidth per tape drive and costs $120/tape. The cloud should be the recovery point of last resort.

Oh yeah. When was the last time a cloud provider went out of business and gave you a week to get your data?

Tape will NEVER go away.

[Roland_Bavington]

Great for low volume restores but rubish for large ones

Remember we are backing up so we can restore. Cloud backup is just dandy for small restores but absolutely hopeless for large ones because of the cost of bandwidth. And it is large restores are the ones that matter on a company-wide scale, that can kill or damage a company significantly. Restoring Miranda's spreadsheet or Steve's photos of his Spanish holiday can be done brilliantly well and fast enough from the cloud but their problems are small and don't really matter in the grand scheme of things!

PS, as of today (April 2016), Googles cost per GB is 10x the cost of the cheapest cloud storage, guess who's?

[yet_another_wumpus]

Any guesses if this makes more sense than Amazon for (excessive) individual use? Do they store your data on tape (like google stores theirs)? Does anybody else provide a "tape via cloud" service, preferably RAIDed across multiple geographic areas?