Tape backup advice ?
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@DustinB3403 said in Tape backup advice ?:
Hand carrying it poses risks as well, like risk from a natural disaster. The goal is to have a geographic separation beyond an hours drive.
That's what you pay Iron Mountain for. They have vaults that can withstand just about anything you throw at it. Short of a nuke going off in the city, then you have other problems to worry about than where your backups are.
Sneakernet throughput is insane compared to most affordable pipes. It takes about 2 hours to go through a tape straight stream. LTO7 holds 6TB/12TB. Even factoring in the transport time of ~4 hours after pickup and 1 hour to put it in a box, you are looking at ~550Mbps with full 2:1 compression. I can sustain that speed from two of my DCs, but hell if I want to send it across to London or Singapore.
Let's not forget about the fact that you are stuffing the pipe with all that traffic. I doubt most SMBs have even the ability to get a 10Gbps pipe I got. My 10Gbps pipe is not dedicated to our DR product, but all traffic. So even if I was replicating 6TB every 6 hours, I have plenty of room to allow others to do things. With most SMBs, they could hope for a 20Mbps up, but most are running on commodity turd pipes with shittastic peering which slows them down.
Of course, this all predicates on what exactly you are backing up. I have 4PB in one DC alone. Tape makes sense. Most SMBs, once their digital packrat tendencies has been culled, don't have even enough to fill up an LTO4 tape.
Cloud backup for small datasets, tape for large.
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@PSX_Defector said in Tape backup advice ?:
That's what you pay Iron Mountain for. They have vaults that can withstand just about anything you throw at it. Short of a nuke going off in the city, then you have other problems to worry about than where your backups are.
Yeah, like your data being on tapes that are too hot to safely handle
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@PSX_Defector said in Tape backup advice ?:
Sneakernet throughput is insane compared to most affordable pipes. It takes about 2 hours to go through a tape straight stream. LTO7 holds 6TB/12TB. Even factoring in the transport time of ~4 hours after pickup and 1 hour to put it in a box, you are looking at ~550Mbps with full 2:1 compression. I can sustain that speed from two of my DCs, but hell if I want to send it across to London or Singapore.
And that is one tape. Tape really explodes when you need more than one. Say your backup spans ten LTO7s. Then suddenly you are driving around 60TB / 150TB at the same speed that you were driving around 6TB before. Until your restore size is larger than what fits in a minivan, tape just scales up "for free."
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I would trust Azure or Amazon cloud in the security aspect a huge amount more than any datacenter I would secure myself with a small team.
These places invest tens of thousands of man hours and the skillset of hundreds of experts in keeping the cloud secure and in working order.
There's no way any of us can say that about our own environments, no matter how skilled you are.
So these people who won't store data on cloud because they don't trust it more than their own environment because they didn't build it is a misconception.
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@Tim_G said in Tape backup advice ?:
I would trust Azure or Amazon cloud in the security aspect a huge amount more than any datacenter I would secure myself with a small team.
Even if I worked for a Fortune 500 with a dedicated security department, I'd still trust them more!
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@Tim_G said in Tape backup advice ?:
So these people who won't store data on cloud because they don't trust it more than their own environment because they didn't build it is a misconception.
It's the "illusion of control."
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Same problem as when driving a car feels safer than riding on an airplane.
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@scottalanmiller said in Tape backup advice ?:
IBM was showing off their insane scale robot at VeeamOn, it was nifty.
Was it one of those room-sized vaults?
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@mobeen said in Tape backup advice ?:
Hi all,
For Offsite Backup I am thinking of Tape Backup option.
We are running Windows Server 2012 File Server with data around 5TB which needs to backed by Tape solution and rotate to offsite.
Tape is one of the option we are thinking of. I am thinking of Full Backup of data for offsite (on Tape) instead of copying Onsite Backup data.
Following are few queries comes to my mind :
- We may need to consider increase of data (around 5GB difference according to Incremental Backup daily happening) before getting Tape Backup, maybe we need to consider of 8TB or 10TB to backed up ?
Sure, but only if you insist on changing a tape once a week instead of twice a week. LTO 7 does 6TB native, and claims 15TB compressed. Planning wise, somewhere between those two extremes will be more realistic depending on how compressible your data is.
- Just wonder what will be the performance difference b/w Tape and External HDD ?
Years ago tape was horribly slow. That's more historic knowledge now than reality. A single, modern, tape drive is much faster than any HDD.
- What are all requirements for Tape Backup solution ? a) Tape Library b) Tape Drives c) Backup software, right ?
Seems to be a good list. I'd add driver, but that should be included with the Tape Drive/Library.
- So which model Tape library will suite us with what size of Tape Drives ? and rough pricing it may cost ?
For a new LTO 7 drive, looks like around $2300. Then $100 per data tape.
We use external USB drives here, but we also don't need to keep to a backup window time. If speed is important, tape can be very appealing today. Then if we assume 10TB external drives, it doesn't take long for costs of drives to be more than the initial investment of a tape drive and tapes.
In your shoes, I'd think a single LTO 7 drive and tapes to match would be the best way to get your offsite data. The costs of external hard drives of a size to match LTO 7 tapes just grows to quickly. Plus, you can use just that single drive without any library needed, keeping things much simpler to manage.
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@travisdh1 said in Tape backup advice ?:
@scottalanmiller said in Tape backup advice ?:
IBM was showing off their insane scale robot at VeeamOn, it was nifty.
Was it one of those room-sized vaults?
Rack sizes. Still quite impressive.
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@scottalanmiller said in Tape backup advice ?:
@travisdh1 said in Tape backup advice ?:
@scottalanmiller said in Tape backup advice ?:
IBM was showing off their insane scale robot at VeeamOn, it was nifty.
Was it one of those room-sized vaults?
Rack sizes. Still quite impressive.
That'd be even more total storage than the room size ones I used to see advertised back in the late 90s!
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@travisdh1 said in Tape backup advice ?:
@scottalanmiller said in Tape backup advice ?:
@travisdh1 said in Tape backup advice ?:
@scottalanmiller said in Tape backup advice ?:
IBM was showing off their insane scale robot at VeeamOn, it was nifty.
Was it one of those room-sized vaults?
Rack sizes. Still quite impressive.
That'd be even more total storage than the room size ones I used to see advertised back in the late 90s!
Single tapes today probably hold more than that!
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@StrongBad said in Tape backup advice ?:
@travisdh1 said in Tape backup advice ?:
@scottalanmiller said in Tape backup advice ?:
@travisdh1 said in Tape backup advice ?:
@scottalanmiller said in Tape backup advice ?:
IBM was showing off their insane scale robot at VeeamOn, it was nifty.
Was it one of those room-sized vaults?
Rack sizes. Still quite impressive.
That'd be even more total storage than the room size ones I used to see advertised back in the late 90s!
Single tapes today probably hold more than that!
Nope, they were advertising Petabyte scale even back then. The largest one I remember was around 5 PB, and was the size of a large room.
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@travisdh1 said in Tape backup advice ?:
@mobeen said in Tape backup advice ?:
Hi all,
For Offsite Backup I am thinking of Tape Backup option.
We are running Windows Server 2012 File Server with data around 5TB which needs to backed by Tape solution and rotate to offsite.
Tape is one of the option we are thinking of. I am thinking of Full Backup of data for offsite (on Tape) instead of copying Onsite Backup data.
Following are few queries comes to my mind :
- We may need to consider increase of data (around 5GB difference according to Incremental Backup daily happening) before getting Tape Backup, maybe we need to consider of 8TB or 10TB to backed up ?
Sure, but only if you insist on changing a tape once a week instead of twice a week. LTO 7 does 6TB native, and claims 15TB compressed. Planning wise, somewhere between those two extremes will be more realistic depending on how compressible your data is.
- Just wonder what will be the performance difference b/w Tape and External HDD ?
Years ago tape was horribly slow. That's more historic knowledge now than reality. A single, modern, tape drive is much faster than any HDD.
- What are all requirements for Tape Backup solution ? a) Tape Library b) Tape Drives c) Backup software, right ?
Seems to be a good list. I'd add driver, but that should be included with the Tape Drive/Library.
- So which model Tape library will suite us with what size of Tape Drives ? and rough pricing it may cost ?
For a new LTO 7 drive, looks like around $2300. Then $100 per data tape.
We use external USB drives here, but we also don't need to keep to a backup window time. If speed is important, tape can be very appealing today. Then if we assume 10TB external drives, it doesn't take long for costs of drives to be more than the initial investment of a tape drive and tapes.
In your shoes, I'd think a single LTO 7 drive and tapes to match would be the best way to get your offsite data. The costs of external hard drives of a size to match LTO 7 tapes just grows to quickly. Plus, you can use just that single drive without any library needed, keeping things much simpler to manage.
That's nice reply
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Thank you all for great responses !!
I am thinking to discuss how Cloud option would fit in our environment. Sorry by mistake I have provided you wrong info that we have Upload speed 10Mbps, while we actually have 20Mbps !!
Maybe creating separate Topic will be good to discuss about Cloud options ?
