Server tape drives

[ytrebil]

Probably quite an obvious and easy answer. However, I was just curious as to why companies (such as the one I currently work for) and many others, still use tape drives to back servers up? I’d have thought this technology would have been superseded by DVD or say flash cards/MMC or even other hard drives? Thanks in advance.

[OriginalDon]

More reliable and more resilliant. Having the abilty to append to the media regulary without disk corruption, better data integrity.

[jimbouk]

I think for reliability they've only been superseeded by some fancy thermo-magnetic nonsense, but that cost more. Hard-drives are good for short term backups, DVDs and memory cards are just too small, so for long term there isn't much else.

[ytrebil]

Thanks for the quick reply. What other media do large servers back up using? Would tape drives be used by all big companies with valuable information? I've always considered tapes to be slow and frankly quite old technology. Is there anything looking to supersede tapes at all? Or will tape drives be around for quite a while yet?

Thanks again!

[gss03]

LTO3 - 400GB Native - 800GB Compressed
LT04 - 800GB Native - 1.6TB Compressed!

I have a client with an LT03 drive backing up 340GB nightly over 2 server - does this in about 8 hours (Backup and verified!) - tape is well and truly the way to go!

[badass]

LTO3 - 400GB Native - 800GB Compressed
LT04 - 800GB Native - 1.6TB Compressed!

I have a client with an LT03 drive backing up 340GB nightly over 2 server - does this in about 8 hours (Backup and verified!) - tape is well and truly the way to go!

QFT!
Plus LTO3 can backup about 2.4GB/min or over 80 MB/sec! (compressed, YMMV)

[Moby-Dick]

Yep - LTO3 drives are pretty fast - and compact for the size of media they can handle.

They are also surprisingly rugged. A briefcase full of 20 tapes can be easily archived for a lot less cost than 20 hard drives ( which take up more room and weigh a lot more )

That said , the use of tapes in terms of a day to day backup medium are getting less frequent. We've been looking at Data de-duplication over a WAN link to a secondary SAN, with Tapes only going off site once a week for archival purposes.

[Phillikon]

Some of my clients are starting to use an exchangeable HDD system, basically just a series of external hard drives in hot pluggable cradles, this way a restore is quick and there is no tape hunting for a restore point. They are easily stored off sight in the bank as well.

we have found in the past that too many (professionals) have no idea how to store or refresh their tape systems, consequently you end up backing up on duff media.
Verification is not always possible as a single backup can span two or more LTO/DLT tapes or in one case library devices.
I agree that in this instance a SAN is the way to go.