Posts by Tygerfeet

Peak Apple: Cupertino belatedly spends some money on R&D

Peak Apple?

When their situation gets really sticky you can call it 'Toffee Apple'

Tape lives: LTO-6 rolls out – with more than TWICE the capacity

Horses for courses

Tape makes for a great long-term safety-net and it's still low cost compared to dedupe appliances, though only for large scale use these days.

Expensive disk used to be the preserve of tier 1 applications but now costly dedupe appliances are often used for backup and archive, which is a bit nuts for long term storage where data is hardly ever recovered.

Having tape for use where data it is hardly ever recovered makes perfect sense, as long as you automate test recoveries AND track it of course. Dedupe to tape means you can write massive amounts to single tape so writing two isn't a problem and also lowers risk. I know a number of large cloud outfits that engineered tape out and are now putting it back in to control costs.

With the right design and SLA's tape is perfectly sensible for use in the cloud where long retention is required and a shared service model is used - each users data may be relatively low but a high number of users means that the data volume is actually very high.