When the company is in litigation and needs data from years back for evidence in court, a few hundred dollars for some tapes seem very cost effective, as opposed to losing a case, or being charged with negligence for loosing data (very high fines apply)!
Roger -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf Of John McKown Sent: Friday, May 02, 2014 7:02 AM To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU Subject: Re: non-IBM: SONY new tape storage - 185 Terabytes on a tape. On Fri, May 2, 2014 at 6:38 AM, Elardus Engelbrecht < elardus.engelbre...@sita.co.za> wrote: > John McKown wrote: > > > > http://www.itworld.com/storage/416783/sony-develops-tape-tech-could-le > ad-185-tb-cartridges > > Hmmm , interesting, but the webpage is slooooow. > > >Just how long would it take to _find and restore_ an individual file > backed up on such a monster? Or even just do a backup to it? What good > is it, unless there is some I/O channel fast enough to do backup and > restores which utilize at least most of the tape? > > I quickly looked at Sony's LTO tape drives (PetaSite) which uses IBM > LTO specifications. Nice expensive things, but nothing, absolute > nothing is written about transfer rates unless I missed it somewhere. > > >Or am I, once again, missing something? > > What if the tape itself is broken or teared? Granted, it is years ago > I encountered a teared tape, but ... > Good point! We had a 3592J tape cart tear just last year. What was especially bad is that it was a 3494 VTS back store tape. So by losing this one physical tape, we lost about 50 virtual 3490 volumes. We were very lucky that the tape was not full and that the virtual volumes lost contained mainly test data. I had argued at the time of installation that we should separate VTS virtual volumes by "environment" with each "environment" having its own set of back store tapes. And then duplexing the back store tapes which contained production data. I was shot down in flames because: (1) 3592J tapes are _expensive_ and duplexing would not be "cost effective"; and (2) it's too difficult to set up! (by the storage admin at the time). > > Groete / Greetings > Elardus Engelbrecht > > -- There is nothing more pleasant than traveling and meeting new people! Genghis Khan Maranatha! <>< John McKown ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
