StarWind Storage Gateway for Backblaze (B2). Calculator. Count your savings.
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@Dashrender said in StarWind Storage Gateway for Backblaze (B2). Calculator. Count your savings.:
you think LTO would be cheaper than SSD drives (assuming the need for a full server is still there for local backups)? or vs HDDs?
LTO is the cheapest media by a long shot. Tape exists because it is so much cheaper than a hard drive.
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@scottalanmiller said in StarWind Storage Gateway for Backblaze (B2). Calculator. Count your savings.:
@Dashrender said in StarWind Storage Gateway for Backblaze (B2). Calculator. Count your savings.:
you think LTO would be cheaper than SSD drives (assuming the need for a full server is still there for local backups)? or vs HDDs?
LTO is the cheapest media by a long shot. Tape exists because it is so much cheaper than a hard drive.
OK I just looked up LTO-6 media
OK that's pretty cheap (damn those prices have fallen!)
now what about the drive?
$2500'ish.... Depending on your rotation, SSDs could easily be cheaper than an LTO setup.
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Quick cost calculator:
HD 6TB: $110
LTO 7 Tape 6T: $60So in raw capacity, the LTO is roughly half the cost of a HD. Not quite half, but nearly. That's a big savings right there. And that's enterprise LTO vs "cheapest consumer item on Amazon" HDD.
Now we have to compare compression. That HD is raw and that's all that you get. You want to compress what is going onto it, you have to buy and deal with that separately. And pretty much no compression meets the hardware compression that LTO does, it's about the best that there is. So realistically, no one talks about raw capacity on LTO because the compression is part of the tape spec and you expect to get 15TB on a drive, compared to actually getting 6TB on the hard drive.
So in real world terms, the LTO is $4/TB compared to $18.33/TB for the HD. Now we are really starting to see savings.
Next up is performance. If capacity isn't your only issue, performance likely is. Filling 6TB will likely take most of a day, if not an entire day. The backup window has to be huge just to write to the drive. And that's only if you write sequentially. If you do anything else, it'll slow down a lot.
LTO 7 speed is 300MB/s (raw) compared to closer to 60MB/s for a standard hard drive (5400 will be much slower, 7200 about this, 10K a little faster.) But an LTO 7 will crush even a 15K hard drive in write performance here.
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@Dashrender said in StarWind Storage Gateway for Backblaze (B2). Calculator. Count your savings.:
$2500'ish.... Depending on your rotation, SSDs could easily be cheaper than an LTO setup.
It's backups, so if you believe in offsite backups, and you have any amount of retention needs (say a month for daily, year for monthly, and five years for annual) you are looking at something like 50 tapes. So 50 tapes at a savings of $50/tape is $2500.
So that's break even for a really minimal backup scheme.
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If your dailies need to be more than 30 days, the savings to tape explodes. And if your backups need to be more than fits on a single hard drive, tape explodes in savings again. Or if you need to back up (or restore) quickly.
If you do like medical or financial transactions, normally you have retention needs that make for a lot more than 50 tapes.
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@scottalanmiller said in StarWind Storage Gateway for Backblaze (B2). Calculator. Count your savings.:
If you do like medical or financial transactions, normally you have retention needs that make for a lot more than 50 tapes.
My retention policy is 2 weeks, 12 months and 5 years... so much media needs would be much smaller.
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@Dashrender said in StarWind Storage Gateway for Backblaze (B2). Calculator. Count your savings.:
@scottalanmiller said in StarWind Storage Gateway for Backblaze (B2). Calculator. Count your savings.:
If you do like medical or financial transactions, normally you have retention needs that make for a lot more than 50 tapes.
My retention policy is 2 weeks, 12 months and 5 years... so much media needs would be much smaller.
Right, you aren't in this category of backup at all to be considering any of this stuff. You are likely talking about GB of data, not TB. You are looking at $9 tapes and $200 drives.
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Also important to note... LTO tapes are built around transport and storage. They can handle temperature changes, bouncing around, etc. Things that specifically are bad for hard drives. And tapes are meant to be reused with regular insertion and removal. Hard drives and SATA connections aren't meant to do that and tend to wear pretty quickly on the connector side. Even USB tends to wear quickly if you are plugging and unplugging constantly.
So reliability of backups is a big factor, too. Five years of retention on hard drives sitting on a shelf takes on a lot of risk that tape does not.
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@scottalanmiller said in StarWind Storage Gateway for Backblaze (B2). Calculator. Count your savings.:
So reliability of backups is a big factor, too. Five years of retention on hard drives sitting on a shelf takes on a lot of risk that tape does not.
This I can't agree with more. People storing 1 of a kind video files that could never be reproduced ever again on a single hard drive and putting that drive on a shelf. . .
Just being modest and suggesting that the area is climate controlled, you'd still lose 30% of these drives just from sitting there.
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@scottalanmiller said in StarWind Storage Gateway for Backblaze (B2). Calculator. Count your savings.:
@JasGot said in StarWind Storage Gateway for Backblaze (B2). Calculator. Count your savings.:
When my company started backing up to B2, we didn't have to upgrade our bandwidth at all. So for us, that $400/mo they added in their assumptions is invalid.
Did you back up 2TB of data?
4TB actually.
