If your storage admin is a bit excitable today, be kind: 45TB LTO-9 tape media and drives just debuted

The Linear Tape-Open (LTO) organisation has signed off on efforts by Fujifilm and Sony to create tapes that conform with the LTO-9 standard – meaning that new-generation tapes with 45 terabytes of capacity are now on sale. Fujifilm bolted out of the gates with an announcement to the effect that it sells media that support LTO- …

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Old IT guy

Isn't it amazing how far, and quickly, the venerable TK50 has evolved?

[Warm Braw]

Re: Old IT guy

Unfortunately, the venerable RP02 has evolved further and more quickly...

The niche for tape storage seems to get narrower with every new generation.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Old IT guy, niche?

I strongly suspect that the niche will be expanding soon.

With the spate of malware that knows how to fiddle with online backups, tape backups that can be stored offline but on premises will be making a comeback.

[Warm Braw]

Re: Old IT guy, niche?

A disk drive in a removable caddy is also offline backup.

It's more expensive than a tape of equivalent capacity - until you factor in the cost of the tape drive. And the fact it takes about 12 hours to write a single tape which does tend to limit your archival "depth".

And given LTO is (generally) only backwards-compatible one generation, the longevity of the tapes is somewhat invalidated by the duration of support for the drives.

[dgeb]

Re: Old IT guy, niche?

If the data volume is low enough, a disk drive in a removable caddy is a good solution. Even rotating several such around will be cheaper than buying a tape drive.

With larger amounts of data, physically transporting a case of disks is (a) harder and (b) carries a greater risk of damage than a case of tapes. Tape also works well when each generation has more cartridges than drives - at this point, the cost of keeping multiple generations rapidly vastly favours it.

Speed, though: sequential throughput on a tape drive is good. It's *much* faster than a single HDD spindle. You probably wouldn't fill an 8TB HDD in the same amount of time as the 18TB tape.

It's also especially beneficial when drives and hosts are many:many, as any single host can then backup/restore in a short time window, even though a full backup/restore of the entire environment might take a couple of days.

[doublelayer]

Re: Old IT guy, niche?

That's not a call for tape. It's a call for cold backups, which you can do on a lot of different media. Cold backups on disconnected spinning disks are just as good for ransomware resistance.

[Phones Sheridan]

Re: Old IT guy

"Isn't it amazing how far, and quickly, the venerable TK50 has evolved?"

For me my first experience of tape backup was a Travan TR1 compatible I picked up (from PAL Computers in Stockport iirc) circa 1995 for my home PC. It slotted into a 3.1/4" floppy bay, and plugged into the second outlet of the floppy cable (incidentally replacing the 5.1/4" floppy B: drive I had at the time). I managed to double the speed of the back up a year later because someone released an accelerator board for it. A whopping 400mb, which wasn't bad considering my drive was 500.

[katrinab]

Their expected compression ratios are a bit optimistic surely?

When I saw the headline, I thought it might be able to back up my 25TB NAS, one of those tapes. But given that it is safe to assume that my actual compression ratio would be a lot closer to 1 than 2.5, it appears that I wouldn't.

[Nick Ryan]

Re: Their expected compression ratios are a bit optimistic surely?

Yep, something that I picked up on years ago is the repeated lies and bullshit marketing from the tape pushers... These are 18TB tapes, and not 45TB as the marketing lies and bullshit claims.

If one happens to have data that is compressible then more data can be stored on the tape but that's effectively no different to backup software that compresses the data.

Other than really larger organisations, most organisations which have over 18TB of data to backup and aren't backing up all client systems will find that the bulk of their storage is taken up by media files... files which are often compressed. Will the magic marketing bullshit compress a video stream by 2.5 times? Will it compress a large archive of images, usually in JPEG form, by 2.5 times? No, it won't. Hell, it's unlikely to compress in any meaningful way Microsoft Office ".*x" format files because these are already compressed even though only in .zip form.

[katrinab]

Re: Their expected compression ratios are a bit optimistic surely?

Most of our data by volume is images in pdf format, produced either buy our scanner, or a scanner belonging to the person who sent it to us.

On one sample image, compressing it using the zip thingy in Windows reduced its size from 1068kb to 1041kb, a compression ratio of 1.02. Other compression algorithms might do a better job, but probably not that much better.

[J. Cook]

Re: Their expected compression ratios are a bit optimistic surely?

Well, yes. And if you use the hardware to encrypt the data, the hardware level compression gets turns off as the two are mutually exclusive. (it also opens a can of worms for getting that data back in the event of a DR event.)

[DS999]

It depends on what you are backing up

If you are backing up Oracle databases, those figures are pretty much right on the mark in my experience. If you are backing up fileservers, it depends on what files are getting stored there and whether they are already compressed like video files.

Before Microsoft started compressing Office documents by default, I imagine people got much better compression ratios for backing up corporate fileservers...

[doublelayer]

Re: It depends on what you are backing up

True, but unlike every other kind of storage, they're quoting a random number which is only true in the optimal case. They should just be honest: 18 TB tapes, and we've got a nice compression system available if you want it. Especially as I can also compress a database and get that large a decrease with a lot of other compression software. If a hard drive or SD card manufacturer said such things, they'd be lambasted and likely sued for false advertising.

[Binraider]

Exciting stuff. I have been running an LTO-5 drive at home, that does nicely for backing up Reason music projects permanently. Second hand market for -6 and -7 drives should hopefully come down in price soon :)

[DS999]

If you live up to your handle

Shouldn't you have to wait until they are thrown out before you get one?

[J. Cook]

Did the companies all get into agreement to not sue each other over who can produce the media this time? Getting LTO8 tapes was a right pain in the tuckus for the longest time because one of the companies decided they wanted the entire pie instead of sharing it...

(and it's kind of irrelevant over here anyway; we went tapeless at the beginning of this year.)

[Binraider]

One never knows when and where Sony's lawyers will decide to try and make a fast buck. Definitely the weak link in the LTO supply chain; it is unfortunate relatively few manufacturers are left.

LTO is an extremely useful format in the right environment, but, like yourself; the high cost doesn't stack up to use cases where tape used to be ubiquitous. Dumping stuff onto web servers seems like a good idea in many respects; but you are relying on their backup policies being adequate to your needs; as well as the risk that if the third party goes bust, will the space on their server be "powered up" for you to recover what you need?

I don't want to be permanently paying web services to host backups of files I access very rarely e.g. Reason audio projects; though equally, I do want a "permanent" backup. Optical media is a bit small for the quantity of data involved (even BD-XL). I can imagine a lot of video producers want that backup capability too, even if they don't know it.

By way of example, do you recall maybe 6 months ago, Sony's lawyers jumped youtubers by claiming ownership over videos that included music that had, up to that point, explicitly been licensed by Youtube for use by content creators. Dick move, Sony. Dick move.

Having a backup of the raw material meant one could re-create the videos free of Sony's meddling. Given the size of video, just keeping it lying around on a bunch of hard disks isn't particularly cost effective or very reliable.

With LTO7-8 drives trading for well over £2k they are a bit too steep for a small video outfit. At £500, however, they start looking very appealling. (And is why I have an old one).