#TAPE DRIVES FOR BACKUP ARCHIVE#
The second option is more likely, and a good backup or archive product should be able to help you consolidate all of your older backup tapes onto newer tapes. That is unless you keep them around just in case and take them off a service contract. If the reason you are upgrading is because your current tape drives are too old and not serviceable, the first option really isn't available to you.
If you have older drives you will be forced to do one of two things: Keep some of your older tape drives or transfer all of your older tapes onto newer tapes. That means that the oldest tapes that LTO-9 drives will be able to read are LTO-7 and LTO-8 but not tapes older than that. LTO standards are read-compatible to two previous generations, and write-compatible to one previous generation. If you are not making a 900 MB/s tape drive happy with your design, upgrading to a 1200-1400 MB/s tape drive will make that situation worse. In that case, upgrading your tape drive is likely to exacerbate the problem. The first only applies if you are still sending very slow backups directly to tape without caching them with a disk target before copying them to tape. Upgrading your tape drives is not without risks. It is possible that replacing your old tape drives with newer LTO-9 drives might actually be less expensive than maintaining a service contract on your older tape drives.
#TAPE DRIVES FOR BACKUP UPGRADE#
The final good reason to upgrade is if your current tape drives are so old you can no longer obtain service for them or that, because of their age, require prohibitively expensive service contracts. You might be able to significantly reduce those monthly costs if you’re using LTO-8 tapes and reduce them even more if you’re using LTO-7. If you are currently paying by the tape for shipping your tapes or storing them in a vault, a financial argument could be made for upgrading to LTO-9 and copying all of your existing tapes to newer, bigger tapes. Second, LTO-9 offers a 50% capacity increase over LTO-8 and a 200% capacity increase over LTO-7. (The three companies behind the standard have not advertised the speed part of the spec yet, but it should be somewhere around 1200-1400 MB/s.) If the difference between 22 and 11 hours changes your business, then by all means upgrade to LTO-9. Copying 1PB to tape takes 22 hours at LTO-7 speeds, and LTO-9 would roughly halve that time.
#TAPE DRIVES FOR BACKUP MOVIE#
The first would be if you have a task that uses large amounts of tape on a regular basis and upgrading to a faster tape drive would increase the speed of that process.įor example, it might make sense for a movie producer using cameras that produce petabytes of data a day who want to create multiple copies and send them to several post-production companies. There are three reasons that could justify upgrading your tape drive. But it is next to impossible these days to properly design a backup system that sends incremental backups across the network directly to tape. It’s OK to use tape to copy your backups for off-site purposes, because your disk-based backup system can be used as a cache for your tape drive, which should allow it to stream at a decent rate during the copy process. That makes tapes as the initial target of backups problematic. It's definitely faster than any incremental backup that will be sent to it, and that comprises most backups. LTO-8 has a compressed transfer speed of 900MB/s, which is significantly faster than most any backup you're going to send to it.
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