Your point is well-taken. It is easy to say that LTO4 media will be good for 30 years, but it would be crazy to put LTO4 tapes in a vault and, even under perfect storage conditions, expect to just pull them out and read them.
Will anybody have LTO4 drives then? No way. Even if you kept a LTO4 tape drive in the vault, would you expect it to work after being stored for 30 years? No way. Do you think you will be able to get a FC adapter or switch to attach it to your server in 30 years? No way. We use TSM for archiving all the time, and we have 30 year retention requirements, too. But when we have to replace LTO4 with LTO5 or LTO6 or whatever it is a few years from now, we plan to use scripts and a plan of continuous "move data"s to migrate all our archive data to the new media. Last year we migrated an environment with 3500 tapes from 3592 media to LTO4, and it took a few months to do, but we did it without any problems, and without loosing any data. Of course, I am not so naive that I think TSM will be around for 30 years either, but I plan to retire before then :-). Just kidding. If and when IBM announces end of life for TSM, we will have to migrate the data to some other archiving system. But at least when that happens, we will have it on media we know we can still read. Best Regards, John D. Schneider Phone: 314-364-3150 Cell: 314-750-8721 Email: [email protected] -----Original Message----- From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Huebschman, George J. Sent: Tuesday, May 05, 2009 3:25 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [ADSM-L] LTO for long term archiving Does anyone have 25 year old tape media or tape drives around? Will you stil be able to use LTOx media in 25 years? -----Original Message----- From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Thomas Denier Sent: Tuesday, May 05, 2009 4:11 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [ADSM-L] LTO for long term archiving I work for a large hospital. I have been asked to investigate possible configurations for archiving something between a few hundred terabytes and a petabyte of data for 25 years. This would be clinical records that we need to keep in case of a malpractice suit. The retention period is 25 years because there are two ways we can get sued for alleged malpractice involving a pediatric patient. The parents or guardians have a seven year window of opportunity to file suit, starting at the time of the alleged malpractice. The patient has a seven year window of opportunity, starting at his or her 18th birthday. In principle, the retention period should vary depending on patient age, but nobody I have talked to so far thinks it is practical to sort records in this way; they want a uniform retention period that covers the worst case scenario (a patient allegedly harmed as a newborn suing just before the end of his or her seven year window). As far as I can tell, the most expensive part of such a configuration is the media, and LTO media will cost about a third as much as the most economical MagStar media (extended length 3592 volumes read and written with TS1130 drives). With the sort of workload described above I don't expect any difficulty staying within the recommended limit on the number of times an LTO volume passes over the tape heads. Are there any other reasons to be nervous about using LTO for long term archives? IMPORTANT: E-mail sent through the Internet is not secure. Legg Mason therefore recommends that you do not send any confidential or sensitive information to us via electronic mail, including social security numbers, account numbers, or personal identification numbers. Delivery, and or timely delivery of Internet mail is not guaranteed. Legg Mason therefore recommends that you do not send time sensitive or action-oriented messages to us via electronic mail. This message is intended for the addressee only and may contain privileged or confidential information. Unless you are the intended recipient, you may not use, copy or disclose to anyone any information contained in this message. If you have received this message in error, please notify the author by replying to this message and then kindly delete the message. Thank you. This e-mail contains information which (a) may be PROPRIETARY IN NATURE OR OTHERWISE PROTECTED BY LAW FROM DISCLOSURE, and (b) is intended only for the use of the addressee(s) named above. If you are not the addressee, or the person responsible for delivering this to the addressee(s), you are notified that reading, copying or distributing this e-mail is prohibited. If you have received this e-mail in error, please contact the sender immediately.
