You found the backup wrap up.
Your go-to podcast for all things backup recovery and cyber recovery.
In this episode, we tackle the age old question, is taped backup dead?
The short answer is no, but it's glory days are definitely over persona, and
I will explain why this happened and how it's probably not what you thought.
We'll also explain why the cloud giants like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft
are the biggest tape users today.
While showing you the four key reasons, the tape remains unbeatable.
If you're thinking tape is outdated, this episode might just change your mind.
Let's get into it.
By the way, if you don't know who I am, I'm w Curtis Preston, AKA, Mr.
Backup, and I've been passionate about backup and recovery for over 30 years.
Ever since.
I had to tell my boss that we had no backups of the production
database that we had just lost.
I don't want that to happen to you, and that's why I do this podcast.
On this podcast, we turn unappreciated backup admins into Cyber Recovery Heroes.
This is the backup wrap up.
Welcome to the show.
Hi, I am w Curtis Preston, AKA mis backup.
And I have with me a guy who has never actually used the thing that we're
gonna talk about in this episode.
Prasanna Malaiyandi, at least not in production.
You've maybe touched one.
I've, I've, I've, I've touched a offspring of it.
An offspring.
What's the offspring of tape?
A zip drive,
a zip drive slash jazz drive,
Zip drive is a bastard.
Stepchild, not an, not an offspring.
I guess that's also a sprint, but
zip drive.
Wow.
That, that is a blast from the past.
and
a jazz drive.
I've used both of those in production.
uh, what's that
In production
in production?
Yeah.
I actually, you know, the, if you go back to the first book that I wrote,
way back in the day.
in the day, uh, no, actually I think it's the sec.
It's the sec. No, it's the fir, uh, I can't remember.
Anyway, there's a chapter in the book, one of the books that I wrote, I
can't, I can't keep 'em all straight.
And it's on Linux, bare metal Recovery.
The Linux Bare metal recovery chapter in that book is based
on doing it with a zip drive,
Hmm.
um, because it was at that time an affordable thing that you
could buy, um, to do, you know,
Yeah, because the
drive itself was
cheap or
relatively cheap, and the actual media wasn't that expensive.
So,
yeah, yeah.
Um, and, you know, we can totally trash talk about the guy that helped
me write that chapter, which is my, my good friend Reed, um, who
I think listens to this podcast.
Reed.
And he, um, he took forever to write that chapter.
Like I, I, it was like one of two chapters that I, that I had
somebody else, uh, help me write.
And, um, let's just say at some point I was like, okay, okay.
The rest of the book is done.
Dude, you just need to write these 10 pages.
Uh, I re
Anyway, um, and speaking of which, you know, got the, what, what was that?
so.
You have to take it back because I have touched something similar.
What, what?
I told you, you said
That's not similar.
That's not tape.
That's a
What about, okay, what about a VHS tape slash a cassette?
VHS you know, uh, we're, We're gonna talk about VHS tape in a minute.
We're gonna talk about VVH
actually, oh
wait, so I have
to go back further.
So I haven't used it in production, but way back in the day, I used to
go with my dad to his office and they had huge machines with tape drives.
The big nine track drives.
You did, uh, like that looked like reels with the thing.
Yeah,
love that you're describing it like, it's like, like a museum piece.
Yes.
Those would be nine track drives.
So, but did you use them?
No.
You, You, okay.
All right.
I take it back.
He has touched the tape.
Uh, it's just you grew up in a different era.
You grew up in it in a different era.
You also worked at a very sort of, I'm gonna call it anti tape vendor.
multiple, anti tape
multiple, multiple anti tape vendors.
Yeah, yeah.
Uh, the meanwhile, I was at the same time, you know, I'd already
spent, you know, 10 years or whatever in deep, you know, in tape.
Uh, and so that's what we're talking about in this episode, by the way,
is we're talking about tape and.
Uh, you know, why, why it's still not dead, right?
Why, why, why, why people think it's dead, why, why it's still not dead.
And, um, um, yeah, and that's what we're gonna talk about.
And to do that, I'm gonna start with VHS You, you, you literally, you, um,
you made, you made me think about that.
There, there's some really important, interesting, at least I think they're
interesting, uh, technical tidbits that we can take from the design of VHS.
So there are, um, and, and because I think a lot of people, when they think
about tape, they think about VHS, right?
It's the only tape that many people have any sort of experience with.
And, and they're like, oh, it's, you know, it's this, it's that.
You know, you have all of these, um.
Uh, problems a number of things.
One is the, the, the substrate quality.
The substrate would be the, the part of the tape that, that you're actually
laying the data on is, you know, miles of difference between a consumer grade VHS
tape and, um, you know, the, uh, now if we do go back in time, there was a time
where there was a tape drive that you could buy for backups that was exactly
the same as a, uh, tape drive that was being used in the consumer world.
And that would be, um, eight millimeter video tapes when there was, when
there was eight millimeter, um,
Sony I
video cam.
Video cameras, right?
Sony's standard, right.
Yeah.
Um, there were, uh, tape drives that were, that you could buy for.
The data center that were literally made on the same, uh, assembly
line as the, as those tapes.
but let me go back to VHS and why, why it's important.
One of the things that people, when they think about VHS and they think
about tape and they think about, oh, the low quality, et cetera, is they
think of like the way audio sounds on some BHS tapes, for example.
Right?
And it, it's just a chance to sort of explain the two different ways that, um,
data is typically written to, uh, tape.
There's what's called helical scan
and there's linear.
Right.
Helical scan is where you take the tape and you wrap it around a drum
that is mounted at like, at a, at a a slant, and then, um, it's gonna write
diagonal stripes across the tape.
Linear is the closest to linear that most people would be
familiar with is a cassette tape,
like an old school.
For those of you,
Hmm.
they remember what cassette tapes are.
It, it's a, it's a stationary head that's writing data across.
Now why does all this matter?
In order to get a high signal to noise ratio, which we want, we want a high
signal to noise ratio because that means that we wrote the data correctly to tape.
In order to get a high signal to noise ratio, the tape has to
go across the head very quickly.
I don't know why that is.
It's just the law of physics.
I didn't, I didn't create it, et cetera.
But that's just the rules.
So you have two ways to do that.
One is you can either, um, do the he scan method, because that way you can,
the, the speed at which the head is going across the tape is determined by
the speed of the spinning drum, right?
And then the other is you can do a, a linear, uh, method.
And the way that you do that is that the, the tape, the tape has to be drug across
that recording head very, very fast.
And when you don't do that, you get a, you get a low signal to noise ratio.
Now lemme go back to VHS tape.
This, this is way before your time, but there was a time
when you had VHS tape and I.
Y if the reason VHS took off in the US market, uh, was two reasons.
One is that, um, um, they bought somebody, somebody bought the entire
back catalog of everything, and you could only get older movies on VHS.
You couldn't get it on Betamax.
Right?
The other reason why it took off was that the tapes were much bigger
and you could fit so much more.
And one of the reasons for that was that they would, they would slow
down the rate at which the tape moved and it would, um, uh, you, you
could fit so much more on the tape.
remember that they used
Do you remember this?
I, I remember this because there were different modes when you're
recording where you could say, extended, right, normal, or
whatever it was, and like, it would be like one hour, one and a half hours or
two hours, or maybe it was like two, three and six hours on a single VHS tape.
Yeah, exactly.
Okay.
Now why does that matter?
Again, this is only gonna speak to some of the older folks that are gonna remember
this, but when they first started doing that, if you chose ep right, the extended
play, the audio sounded like crap.
Okay.
It really did.
Like you had to choose, do I want to fit a three hour movie on the
tape, or do I want to be able to understand a three hour movie?
Right.
Those were your choices.
Three hour movie.
Yeah.
What they did was that they moved the audio head onto the spinning drum.
Hmm.
And so now the audio is being recorded at the same speed because when you did
ep, the tape was crawling across the recording head, which was fine for the
video because the, the drum still spun and the video was fine, but the audio
sounded like crap because as I was trying to explain, tape has to go across a
recording head quickly in order to get a high signal to high signal to noise ratio.
In this case, you were getting a low signal to noise ratio, which results in
data loss, which results in bad audio.
And in the computer world, that would be very, very bad.
So what they did in VHS was they just moved the audio head up to the record,
up to the spinning drum, and then that created what was called Hi-Fi VCRs,
right?
So that you could get high fidelity audio along with your high fidelity video.
high fidelity at the time.
We should clarify.
the time.
At the time, yeah.
Yeah.
Um, all of that is to just drive home a really important point when we talk
about tape, and that is we're gonna talk about tape and what's good about it.
One of the real challenges with tape is that it has to go very
quickly in order to write the data.
Mm-hmm.
Okay?
It cannot go slow.
That's tape's primary problem.
We'll get to that.
Um, and this just drives home that point, right?
That tape does have to go very fast.
And by the way, it's important to understand that.
Almost all of the digital tapes that are taped drives that are
being used in production today.
LTO, the T series from I from, um, uh, what is it now?
Uh, Oracle, it, was it Sun Source Tag?
Yeah.
Oracle
Yeah.
So I don't even think, I don't think they're not in production, but
they're still in, use the t series from, from them, like the T 10 Ks,
the um, and then the IBM series that are like, start with a three.
Okay.
Those are all linear tapes, meaning that the tape head stationary and
the tape is brought across it, which means that that tape helps to go very,
very fast when it's recording data.
Otherwise you get data loss.
Okay.
It's just a really important, it's just we, you start, you brought up
VHS, I just thought I'd use that to illustrate this really important point.
I hope everyone found that interesting.
I. If not, we're 10 minutes into the thing and I just bored
but, I think another important thing, so we've also covered a
lot of the technical aspects of tape and prior podcast episodes.
We even had, uh, what was the guy's name?
Joe Jurneke.
Joe on talking about that as well.
So if you wanna really geek out on tape, we'll add links in the show
You know, add some links.
Yeah.
In the description.
Exactly.
So let, let's just, let's just talk about, so first off, you know, I'm
gonna say some stuff that, you know, that might go, you know, against, so
first off, just a couple of facts.
More tape is sold today than ever before.
Uh, that surprises most people.
When I say that,
Well,
what, what do you think about when I say that?
I, so I was surprised the first time, and I can't remember, this must have
been like seven, eight years ago
when people were saying, and I don't know what the number is now, that tape is
still like over a billion dollars a year,
Editor's Note: 4.4 Billion dollars a year in 2024, to be exact,
growing at CAGR of $7.8% per year.
Yeah,
right?
Which surprises because everyone always talks about disc, but
tape has its purpose, right?
And so I'm not surprised that you're saying more tape is
sold today than ever before.
Because
we have such huge data sets, right?
Everyone's keeping data forever.
We're now creating all these large data sets with ai, with DNA sequencing,
with all of these other things that require a significant amount.
The what is the electron collider thing that
creates a huge amount of data, right?
And so people want to keep that.
You wanna put it somewhere, tape is super cheap, right?
It's a great
place to store data.
So I'm
not surprised.
More tape is sold today than ever before.
It's an abs also an absolute fact that mi um, a lot fewer environments
use tape for their backups today than they, than than they did today.
It's, it's a, I don't know what the percentage is, but it's very, very small.
Right.
And if we look at the percentage of people who send their backups directly
to tape, that percentage is really small.
The, the main people that I know that are using backups for tape
are using it for that second copy.
Yeah.
Do you think people,
are you putting less backups on tape because they've adopted disk,
they've adopted SaaS applications.
They've adopted cloud native, all of the above.
yeah, all of the above.
But it really started with tape be, tape became a real pain in the ass.
When, when it was used for backups, right?
Because tape tape is really bad at incremental backups because again,
increment incremental backups go slow, tape can't go slow.
It was a fundamental mismatch of technology.
Most backups are incremental backups.
Today, more backups were incremental backups than ever before.
And, uh, it, it, it was just a fundamental mismatch, and they
had to find something better.
And they were finding something better even before DDU came along, right?
We were starting to do dis staging and things like that.
So, yeah, so the backup world went away from tape, you know, because it was just
really, really difficult to use for that.
Not because it wasn't reliable, not because it was slow, none of
those things, but because it was a fundamental mismatch of technology.
Okay, so let's take those two facts.
More.
Tape is sold today than ever before.
one's using it for backup.
So who's using tape?
I am going to go out on a limb and say the hyperscalers,
Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.
Yeah, so it's the, the worst kept secret in the tape world that,
you know, Amazon, Google, IBM, uh,
uh, Microsoft.
Thank you.
Microsoft are the biggest customers of tape.
To which again, many people would be like, what?
Right.
They're, they're, wait, wait.
They're the future, right?
Cloud is the future.
You're telling me that the biggest users of tape today are cloud Really?
And I'm not surprised, right?
Because everyone throws data up in the cloud.
Everyone wants it to be the lowest cost possible.
Yes.
And the cloud providers, right?
The hyper scales are going to provide a service to meet the customer needs, right?
Large
amounts of data, low cost.
What can they offer?
yeah.
Large amounts of data.
Keep it for a really long time, really low cost, and I'm probably
not gonna ever look at it,
Yep.
right?
Or my, or, you know, and, and so yes, that stuff, like when you start talking about,
and again, I can't speak specifically to certain products as to which ones use tape
and which ones don't, but I can absolutely tell you that when we start talking about
products like Glacier Deep Archive, those products are most likely using tape.
And if you look at, go
And what gets you to that conclusion though?
Maybe for people who aren't as familiar with Glacier Deep
Well, well, two reasons.
One is the cost and, and, and the behavior of how things like Glacier Deep Archive.
Again, I'm not speaking specifically about that product, I'm just using
it 'cause everybody knows its name.
Uh, if you look at it, the retrieval time is, is very tape friendly.
The normal retrieval time is very tape friendly.
It's measured in hours, not seconds.
Right.
Even the quick access is still measured in minutes, not in seconds.
And so that's all very tape friendly.
And all that is is when you look at a gigantic tape library,
it's just prioritization of requests is really all that is.
It, it takes, it takes a, a, a couple of minutes to get to an object in
the middle of the biggest tape.
That's out there, right?
It'll take literally 10 seconds to get it from whatever slot it's in to
whatever drive you want it to be in.
And it takes an average of about two minutes to get to the file, no
matter where it is on tape, right?
And so it, it's, it's perfect for tape.
Notice that the service descriptions pay very close attention.
They don't say anything about what they're storing it on.
They're just like, you're gonna give us a thing, we're gonna charge you this much.
You're gonna agree not to ask for it anytime, anytime soon, right?
Uh, and if you do, we're gonna charge you, you know, uh, up
the wazoo, uh, for it, right?
now we, I should preface this by saying you and I have no insider
knowledge of what they actually do or how it's been built.
It's just our understanding based on publicly available materials.
And I, I will say I have, I have a tiny amount of insider knowledge in that I
do talk to a lot of tape people and they all tell me that, you know, all these
companies are their biggest customers.
They gotta be using it for something.
This is what I think they're using it for.
Right.
Um, and they probably also, and again, don't know this for sure, but
they probably also are doing object level backup from a DR perspective,
but don't know that for sure.
Right.
Um, so that's all to say that, um, you know, the title of the
thing is this tape Back up Dead.
So, so we sort of, and we're, we're still in like the intro at this point.
Right.
Um, so, so let's go back to why tape.
Um.
Sort of died in, um, in every day, what I'm gonna call
operational backup and recovery.
There's two reasons.
We, you know, in the backup world, we talk about backup and operational
recovery, which is I deleted this file, and then there's disaster recovery
tape still has a place, I think, in disaster recovery, le much less
of a place in operational recovery.
Um, so I, I'm gonna give you, I'm gonna give you a, an ab question, uh, ab
question, an a multiple choice question.
I'm gonna give you a multiple choice question.
The reason tape became a real pain in the butt in backup and recovery is
that it was A too slow B, too fast.
Can I go with C
What?
What's c?
Pickles?
No, so, so I, so, so, okay.
So I will tell you what I thought before you and I had
conversations about tape, right?
My understanding at the time or by it was that tape was too slow,
that everything was moving way too fast, right?
And that networks and disc and everything else is so much faster,
and therefore tape died off.
And
therefore, and that's why everyone switched from using tape to using disc.
That's what I
thought before we started.
that is, uh, I'm so glad to hear that you, that you have learned, you know,
the error of uas, that is the most common misunderstanding of tape, right?
Is that the reason tape went away is because it was too slow, right.
The truth is actually the opposite.
And what's interesting is.
It, it was some, it was somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophecy, right?
Because people thought tape was too slow.
They treated it like it was too slow, which then made it too slow.
Um, so let me, let me explain what I mean by that.
And I, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna tell a, tell a story, okay, so
large entertainment company, right?
One that, that everybody would know who they were, are they're still around.
And they had, my memory is that they had about 20 terabytes of
data that they were backing up.
They had 18 tape drives running around the clock.
They were literally like.
Backing up like 28 hours a day.
They, they just, they were never finishing their backups.
Not once Were they ever finishing a, a complete backup?
It, it was, it was a complete disaster.
And, um, I took a look at the numbers and in five minutes I be, I, I knew
what the problem was and I charged them a crap ton of money to fix it.
Right.
Their solution was to go buy more tape.
which is what you would think.
Or tape drives, right?
Yeah.
Buy more tape drives.
Yeah.
They were using, um, the storage tech 98, 40 drives, and they said, we just
need to buy two more of these things.
We think that'll fix it.
Right.
Because we're at 28 hours a day.
We need to get to 23 hours a day, and these two drives will get us back.
You know, and I, and these drive, those drives were expensive.
They were like.
it is like $20,000 it seems like, like, like per tape.
Which would be like a million
great.
They were really expensive.
What was
Which would be like a million dollars today.
Yeah.
This, this is a 15-year-old story.
Um, so I said, please don't do that.
Right?
And then I basically, what, what I remember saying, I don't remember
this, this is a hundred percent what I said was, give me that money, right?
Give me that money.
Instead of spending, you know, $30,000 or whatever it was on, on tapes, give
me the $30,000 and I will guarantee that we will solve this problem and we're
actually gonna, we're gonna make it so much better than you could ever dream.
And, and if I don't.
You can have your money back and you can go buy your stupid tape drives.
And we went in there and I made a bunch of configuration
changes to their environment.
One of them was, um, they were specifically listing file systems
rather than just saying this was a net backup environment rather
than just saying all local drives.
Right.
And that it's one of my pet peeves.
Right.
Don't do that.
Don't, because you'll miss stuff.
And I was right.
They were missing, uh, 50% or 30% of their environment.
So
now they needed four drives instead of two
So they were backing up 20 terabytes.
And by the time I had finished, you know, tweaking their all local drives,
they were now backing up 30 terabytes.
They were missing 30% of their environment.
Um, and of the, the new, the new 10 very little of it was true garbage.
You know, like, I was like, oh, so what you do is you say, back up
everything and then exclude the things that you definitely know are garbage.
We're gonna exclude temp, we're gonna exclude like in temporary internet
files and, and windows and so on, right?
And, um, so we increased the amount of data that they were backing up.
Uh, we increased it by 50%.
They were backing it up once a day, not finishing it.
By the end they were creating two copies instead of just one copy.
The backups were finishing.
Overnight,
meaning they were running in like eight hours instead of 28 hours, and we were
using six of the tape drives they had.
So what I remember was of the, like the 16 or 18, whatever, how, whatever the number
was of the drives that they had, six of them were the newer, like 98, 40 drives.
And then the other ones were the older drives.
So I was able to retire the older drives.
So go from 16 tapes down to six tapes.
Um, go from one copy to two, copy go from 20 terabytes to 30 terabytes.
Did all of that by simply making configuration changes in the environment.
And it all had to do with recognizing the fact that these
tape drives were starving for data.
Right.
Um, because as I illustrated with the VHS thing, um.
Tape drives, want the data to go very fast.
Tape drives have two speeds.
They have stop and they have very fast.
Right.
Now that's, that's a bit simplistic.
There are some, some steps that different drives can do, but they
do have a minimum, you know, a minimum speed at which they can go.
And if you try to go slower than that, they cannot go slower than that.
So they speed up to their minimum speed.
They write the data that's in the buffer, they turn back in and they look
at the buffer and the buffer's empty because you're not feeding the buffer.
And then they stop and they have to back hitch and they do it.
And that's what they call shoe shining.
The tape drive as a result becomes slow.
That's what I was saying.
When you treat a tape like a tape drive, like it's slow and to make it
faster, you buy another tape drive, you actually make the tape drive slower.
Right.
That's, that's, that's what I meant by, because they believed it.
They made it so
like, it's like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
so I definitely agree that's one of the problems with tape or why tape sort of
went away and, but I think you had also alluded to sort of the problem, uh, at the
start of the episode, right, where backups have changed formats to incrementals
and I think one of the challenges speeding onto what you were saying
with it being slow, is I. They're not able to feed enough data to tape drives
when you're just doing incrementals.
Yeah.
And you know when, when I, I, so my memory is that once we solved
the tape problem, the world went to Forever Incremental, right?
Um, there was only one company that was doing Forever Incremental back then.
And that was IBM with A DSM, which became TSM, which became, uh, spectrum Protect.
Um, and.
The only way TSM would really work is if you did disc staging, right?
So we just, we just started moving slower and slower away from tape.
And then once DDU came on the scene, it solved the cost
problem, uh, from for disc, right?
Um, and then we just started moving off of tape, uh, as much as we can, um,
or for operational recovery.
So it turns out tape is actually way faster than we needed it to be.
When we talk about data transfer rate, tape is indeed slow.
When we talk about.
Random access tape is not random access.
So if you're, if you need it to behave like an object storage system, which
you could, you could do it right?
There's LTFS, you can write to it like an object storage system.
It's just gonna be really slow when compared to anything other than tape.
Um, and tape will become slow if you treat it like it's slow, right?
Um, and, and so there were all these design considerations, some of which
we talked about in a few episodes ago.
All of these design considerations that we did in order to, you know,
all of the contortions that we went through to make tape, uh, happy, right?
What I found was that if you made tape happy, if you gave the tape drive the
amount of data that it needed, then everything, literally the skies would
open up to, the angels would sing.
You know, the rain would go away, right?
The tape drives would also become more reliable, because when you treat them
like, you know, they're shoe shining all day, they also become unreliable.
They become slow and they become unreliable.
and you had that issue last year when you were dealing with the customer or with the
I did,
right?
Where.
yes.
The tapes were not happy with you.
The drives, in fact,
would overheat.
I think you had to replace them once or twice.
They
were
yeah.
happy running 24 7 for months
on end.
yeah.
And, and, and they weren't.
And the, they were also being shoeshine to death.
Right.
Because I couldn't, I was backing up across s and b over the network.
It just, it was, it, it was just, it was just not good.
And also the, the, you remember the core problem was that there were
millions and millions of fights.
And so a lot of people went to DISC and specifically Deduplicate disc and
Deduplicate backup services and, you know, and software, you know, like the, the, the
first one I re really remember was Avamar.
Right.
Um, which for those that don't know, before it was Avamar, it was called Undo
with two O's.
Um, they were actually, they were invented, I don't know, I dunno what,
I dunno what the right, they, they started creating Avamar, like right up
the road from me, like up in Irvine.
That's where I first,
I've been, to their offices.
Yeah.
Um, and, um, uh, they were like the first like DDU backup
software that was like, right.
And then I remember Commvault started adding it.
Veritas started adding, and then you started getting these
services, um, that, that, that, it's just a core design element.
Right.
Um, and, and as a result, tape just got smaller and smaller
and smaller and smaller.
Now, fast forward to today.
Why would I want to think about tape at all?
Right?
And so the, the title is,
is Tape Backup Dead?
The answer is no.
Right?
It's not dead.
It is definitely on life support.
So,
Uh, but there are real reasons why we would wanna use tape.
And I know the, so far we've talked about operational recovery,
right?
But one thing that pops to mind is disaster recovery,
Yes.
right?
How difficult is it for you to take a copy off site, uh, when you are storing
something on, say, a disc based system?
Right.
Are
you going to copy it onto disc?
And I know there are companies that do like removable disc packs and things like
that, but that's quite a lot of, like, physically, that's
a lot to take with you, right?
Versus can I just take a small tape and then move it offsite?
exactly.
Because, and again, it's a, it's a phrase that some people use a lot, never
underestimate the bandwidth of a truck.
Right.
Yep.
Truck has unlimited bandwidth, really bad latency.
yep.
Right.
Or,
But yeah, you, you can move, you can move an immeasurable amount of data
via tape by going from A to B, right?
we used to call it also sneaker net
Yeah.
Sneaker net's another.
Yeah.
'cause you're, you know, it's, it's going back and forth.
Um,
and
before we, before we get to that, let's just, I'm, I'm just gonna try
to summarize and we, I, I'm sure we have an episode where we go to this in
more, de go into this in more detail.
But let me just summarize sort of, I think it's gonna be three reasons why tape.
Is still, you know, the value that tape still brings.
One is you cannot beat the cost.
It's not even close.
I don't care.
The cheapest cloud storage, the cheapest on-prem object storage that
you can buy, it will not even approach.
It will be one, possibly two orders of magnitude cheaper.
It's just not even close.
Right.
FF go ahead.
When you say cost, are you talking the cost of the media or are you
I'm talking everything.
I'm talking fully burdened cost, including the cost of buying a tape
library, powering that tape library, uh, dealing with tape management,
putting those tapes somewhere.
That's not the tape library because you didn't buy a tape library big enough,
iron Mountain contract, all of that.
It's not even close.
It will be one, possibly two orders of magnitude cheaper
than the cheapest alternative.
And that's just a fact.
Okay.
Um, and the, one of the core reasons for that is that tape, unlike most
other media, the media is separate from the thing that makes the media
right, that writes to the media.
And because of that, the tape is so cheap in comparison, uh, to.
Anything else, right?
Right.
So, so cost is number one.
And by the way, that includes power, that includes cooling,
that includes all those things.
That's in fact, if I, I've made this claim before, if a disc was
free, tape would still be cheaper
I remember
because of, because of, the power cooling.
Okay.
Which means it's also greener.
For those of you that care about those things, it, it
means it's also greener, right?
Um, so it's cheaper.
And then these two will surprise, probably.
Uh, well, uh, okay.
I, I remember.
Okay, so I came up with the fourth reason.
So second is that it's faster, right?
It's faster from a, if you need to transfer a crap ton of data from A to B,
it's faster to write it to tape than it is to write it to any disc on the planet.
I don't care which disc we're talking about.
I don't care if we're talking solid state, rotational disc, whatever
it is, just from a transfer rate perspective, tape is faster than disc.
It's without question.
Okay?
Number one, number two.
Um, and then, and then when we talk, you know, the thing that you
brought up when we start talking about, um, um, uh, bandwidth,
right?
Tape has unlimited bandwidth, right?
And then the two that, that I think will actually, and by the way, I think that
one will surprise a lot of people too.
But feel free to, feel free to check me.
Uh, but check yourself for you Ricky stuff.
Um, tape is also better at writing ones and zeros than disc is.
Tape is also better at holding on to ones and zeros than disc is
by.
A
by multiple orders of magnitude, right?
Um, so this has to do with something called, uh, well the first one has
to do with the, the bit error rate.
So for every, every, you know, 10 million zeros that you write,
you're gonna write one wrong.
I'm just making up a number there, but that, that's somewhere in there.
It's, it's one 10 to the like 15th or something.
Right?
That's.
Like, uh, there's like when, when we look at disc and there's, there's SATA
disc, fiber channel, disc, and then we start talking about solid state disc.
Each of these, those in order.
Those are better at writing ones and zeros.
But when we get, and, and it's like, and I'm, I, I can't do the exact,
the, the last time I looked, it was like 10 to the 14th, 10 to the 15th.
10 to the 16th.
When we start looking at like SATA fiber channel and, and, uh, SSDs.
Um, but at that point, the worst tape drive was 10 to the 18th.
The best tape drive was like 10 to the 20th.
That means it's four.
What, what would that be?
That means it's 10,000 times better,
Yeah.
Oh, sorry.
right?
Because it's four zeros.
It's 10,000.
times better at writing ones and zeros than discus, than the best, uh, disc.
And
that's Yeah.
And like you said, That's just writing the
just writing it.
Yeah.
The first time.
Because every time you write ones and zeros, some of them are
going to be written and wrong.
This is why we have ECC by the way, this is after ECC,
yeah,
right?
Um, that's error correction codes.
Um, so it's better at writing the ones and zeros in the first place.
It's also better at storing the ones and zeros for long term.
And that was what we had Joe Jurneke to talk about.
Something called, um, bit, uh, bit rot
Yeah.
and is the, that's the vernacular term, but the, the
of
what?
Coercivity.
Coercivity, it comes from the idea that a one.
Could be coerced to be a zero
right?
Over time based on heat and the size of the grain.
Bigger the grain, the better.
the the cooler the media, the better tape has gigantic grains in contrast
with, uh, any other magnetic media.
And tape is stored in ambient temperatures versus disc that is
typically very, very hot all the time.
Yep.
Um, you can play with it a little bit.
It's a formula.
K-U-V-K-U-V over kt.
You can play with it a little bit when we start talking about things like
made where they power off some of the discs that will extend the life better.
But tape by design is kept cool, you know, unless it's being used
not
gonna keep it in the back of your car, or you shouldn't keep it in the trunk of
You shouldn't,
in the middle of summer in India,
Exactly.
Um, and so.
Those are, those are four reasons.
Cost, speed, um, what would you call that?
Um, integrity, uh, initial integrity and long-term integrity.
Those are the four reasons why you might want to think about tape.
Now, let's talk about the fifth, which is really what, to go back
to what we were talking about before you brought up about Dr.
Yep.
Why, what would be the additional feature that tape can bring
when we start talking about Dr.
You can basically just
copy it, ship it off somewhere else and just leave it there.
And if something happens, you have that copy.
It's low cost, like all those four factors you talked
about before.
Right.
You know it's gonna be there, ready for whenever you need it.
You could pull it back, you could restore it and you can get going again.
So that is true.
That isn't where I was going, but that is true.
But that is all true.
Right?
So because that means it is easy to put it somewhere else,
right?
Because of that unlimited bandwidth because you can, you know, hand it to
a FedEx person and magic happens and it just shows up in a, in another place.
Right.
Um,
What were
you getting at?
is the number one reason that people are currently doing disaster recoveries?
Oh, ransomware, because it's
air gaped.
tape is very ransomware proof,
Yeah.
right?
We talk, when we talk about ransomware a lot, we talk about immutability.
Right.
What is immutability Prasanna.
It's once it's been written, it's How difficult is it?
Well, it shouldn't be able to be erased or modified or changed
Correct?
Correct.
Um,
has elapsed.
yeah, that's what immutability means.
And tape is by design.
Tape can be made to be literally immutable.
Uh, like even in the drive, it cannot be overwritten, even if you've
got physical access to the drive.
It's, it's a truly immutable medium.
And so, and, and even that feature aside, it's a tape sitting on a shelf, right?
And it, and it, and maybe even in a, you know, you, you can secure
it as much as you wanna secure it.
You can put armed guards in front of it, right?
Um, and It.
go
it, does have a fatal flaw.
Talk to me.
Magnets.
Okay.
It for, for the record, it has to be really, really strong magnets.
It requires, so speaking as you know, I work for a company, one of the things
that we do is, is data destruction.
Uh, it requires really big
magnets in order to, in order to degausse be the term to de to degausse tape.
which is the same thing with hard drives, right?
If you get a strong enough magnet, you're gonna have the same issue as well,
Yeah, exactly.
Um, and, um,
but,
but it, it's a, it's a hundred percent immutable copy that is easy
to get very far away from here.
yep.
Right.
Um, you can have somebody completely outside of your company holding onto it.
You don't need to power it.
This is, I think the, the, the, the number one use case for tape in the.
Backup and disaster recovery arena today is Dr. Especially
defense against ransomware.
Yeah.
And you don't even need to ship it outside your site if you don't want
to because of the fact that it is an air gapped copy that is typically
not available on the network.
Well, I'm gonna say for ransomware purposes, no,
For ransomware.
but when we start talking about the other things, we do want that,
that one copy somewhere else.
Right.
Um, what was the O-O-O-V-H?
Yes.
Just re just go listen to the episode on the OVH disaster where they took
out the fire, the very intensive fire took out both the data center and the
place where the, where the tapes were because they were all in the same place.
I remember the first time I went and I saw someone else talking about backups
and they were talking about tape.
The title of the presentation was basic, something along the lines
of like, why tape sucks for backup.
And it was this guy that had made a bunch of tape backups and he had put them in
a box and he had put the box on top of the server and the server had caught
fire and it had taken the tapes with it.
And that's why tape backup suck.
So there's a story I have where someone, you and I know,
Yeah.
a developer working on a product for tape.
Yeah.
And, uh, he would basically, uh, write the data out to the tape.
He would take it outta the tape drive because he was doing some testing
and he would put it on his shelf
Yeah,
then he would go to go read the tape again, and he'd have issues.
He's like, what's going on?
And he kept thinking, oh, it's my code.
It's my code.
He kept debugging it, taking every look at everything.
So apparently the shelf, he put his, the tapes on underneath that was
one of those lamps, lights, and it stuck onto the thing with the magnet.
that's pretty funny.
Yes.
So that was my first, uh, intro into tapes.
Is this a guy that rides his bike to work a lot?
That's what I thought.
Okay.
Yeah.
Uh, so I know who you're talking about.
Um, yeah, anyway.
Interesting.
I, yeah, I'm trying to think if the, one of the cooler stories that I remember that
was like, that was, uh, that, um, there was a, there was an offsite, like a, like
a, what, what is it, what do we call it?
The.
Robo Right.
Ramos branch office.
And the solution for that particular office was, they, they
didn't have any IT people there.
And so they had a security guard whose job it was to take this, um, to take a,
a, a case that was designed to hold a single LTO tape, take out the LTO tape,
put it in the case, FedEx the case back, they would FedEx the other case back.
And they, this is how they did offsite tape.
And it was months later that they found out that he just found it easier
to just not put anything in the case.
It's So they were just shipping
Empty
tapes back and forth?
Oh no.
Yeah.
They, and the way they, the way they proved it, nobody thought to look at this.
Nobody ever opened a case.
yeah.
Right.
And so what they did was they went and they looked back at the, uh, the
The weight.
weight.
And the weight was, his weight is always the, so he had never, ever put a
Oh, no.
Yeah.
That another one, and another one that I remember was, um, this
woman that worked at a, this was at a large, uh, aerospace company.
And, um, she, they had a system where, again, there were no IT people, but there
was a tape there, and they would eject the tape and she was supposed to pull that
tape out and put another tape back in.
She just kept pushing the tape back in.
And so it, they had backups, but they only had the latest backup.
Right.
And, um, and at the time that, that turned out to be a problem.
Yeah.
Ugh.
So, yeah.
So tape, tape backup is not dead.
Um, I will, oh, I, I now know there was something that I,
a point that I wanted to make
while it is difficult, near impossible, actually.
To do incremental backups directly to tape, even if what we're talking about
is incremental backups once they have been copied to some kind of disc medium.
Copying those backups to tape should be easy peasy, right?
Because you should be able, and, and that can be built into the design.
You can figure out what's the speed of the, of the disc, right?
Uh, you know, and what's the speed of the tape?
And you can match those.
It that should work.
You can build that into the design and make sure that you've got
enough sufficient transfer speed.
Even if it's incremental backups, it doesn't matter.
It should transfer to tape, no problem.
And so that's what that meant earlier where I said when we back up to disc, uh,
I think the primary use of tape today.
In backup is that second copy, because if we're using, let's say, a big D
dupe box for our operational backup and recovery, it's very easy to make a copy
from that DDU box to tape and then ship that even if you never used the tape.
It's still easy to do that on a pretty regular basis.
Oh
What what, what, what, what is that?
What is this face?
I would never, sorry.
Depending on the architecture of the deduplicate appliance
and how it's configured, doing reads from disc to do take that
backup and run it off to tape.
Could be painful, slow, and slower,
in fact, than your initial backup speeds.
as I mentioned.
It should work.
You need to figure it into the design.
You may find that the DDU box that you, that you want to buy or one
that you already own, that the speeds with, which I would argue, I would
argue that if it's truly that slow at transferring those backups out
to tape, it would also be truly slow
when doing a recovery.
'cause the operation is identical.
And so if that is a problem with your d dupe device that you are
using, then you need to address that.
Yeah.
So we're on the same page there.
I think,
Okay.
uh, you know, I was telling you about that.
I was telling you yesterday, I was talking about that box that I worked
with a hundred years ago where
this was a long time ago.
The, the aggregate.
Backup speed, you know, to back up to it,
uh, or right speed, I guess you would say.
The aggregate right speed was 400 megabytes per second.
The aggregate, uh, read speed.
So no matter how many backups you re no ma, no matter how many restores you
ran, uh, it was 40 megabytes per second.
Ouch.
And, um, they, they, address that, uh, in, in later designs
of that particular product.
But, um, yeah, you, you cannot assume you, not only can you not assume, you
should probably assume the opposite.
You should probably assume that reed speeds are gonna suck because
of the way that some DDU data gets, uh, written down to, to, to disc.
Um, okay, so.
So tape's not dead, um, not going anywhere soon.
It's still still the cheapest, most effective way to, to,
to transfer data around.
Also great about storing data in the first place holds onto it.
You just have to build that into your design from a backup
and recovery perspective.
And so most people when designing backup systems today, don't use tape as
a, certainly not as the initial copy, but they might use it as a secondary
copy, and I have no problem with that.
Yeah,
Um, any final thoughts from you?
the only comment I had was when we were talking about the hyperscalers and their
use of tape and offering this low cost storage.
yeah.
Um, I know we always talk about throw the data in there and never
touch it, because that's probably what you're going to do, but
please make sure you at least test it before you make that conclusion because.
yeah.
at least understand, because as we're talking about the restore speeds of that
appliance you were talking about, right.
I was like, oh yeah.
People should probably test what the restore performance looks like from that
copy if they are using cloud or deep archive storage in the cloud, just to
make sure they understand the performance of that.
I, I, I, I don't have any problem with that comment.
I, and I, you know, and I, I would say that's probably true of all parts of it,
right?
Anywhere, especially anywhere where you're storing data.
So thanks, Prasanna for the conversation.
Okay.
You're hilarious and thanks to our listeners, make sure to subscribe
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That is a wrap.