
Out of Stock: How to Survive the LTO-8 Tape Shortage - ingve
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/how-to-survive-the-lto-8-tape-shortage/
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kev009
At this point you are probably buying an IBM LTO tape drive no matter the
label on the front. If you're buying a library, I don't really see any reason
not to go with IBM "Enterprise Tape". It blows LTO out of the water in
capacity and performance, and the media upward and downward compatibility are
astonishing
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_3592](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_3592)

LTO was an interesting period and probably most useful for media professionals
that have single tape drive decks. But the real market for tape is massive
silos where the tapes sit reliably, dutifully, and not using any power while
holding massive quantities of data. And if you have to use a "proprietary"
tape cartridge and drive to do it, I fail to see how that's any different than
the proprietary disks, disk bus interfaces, or flash and FTLs. On the other
side you're talking FC or SAS or Ethernet, same as disk/flash talking SAS or
NVMe.

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mjevans
I'd use Backblaze a LOT more... if consumer ISPs in the US weren't pretty much
monopoly BS. (Can you really call "up to" 12mbit down (and like 1mbit up max)
VDSL a competitor to 1000mbit down ~30mbit up cable? Both of which are WAY TOO
SLOW for backup up real workloads! Let alone the caps @.@)...

Also no, where I live is typical of American Surburbia, if anything it's
actually slightly better than the median who suffer through Ex-GTE hell and
cable ISPs so bad they make even comcrud look good.

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Dylan16807
> Both of which are WAY TOO SLOW for backup up real workloads!

If you use half of a 30mbit upload for backing up, that's 5 terabytes a month.
I think that covers a lot of real workloads.

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cm2187
Except that if you saturate your uplink you will also likely make your
downlink sluggish.

And a user may not want to wait 20 hours for an operation to complete.

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philjohn
Backblaze has a bandwidth limit setting if this is a concern.

Yes - your first upload is going to be painful, but for the average user the
following incremental backups are just a blip.

And if you're a business and have lots of files to backup, well, it's leased
line time.

~~~
kenhwang
Took me the entire 15 day trial period for my initial backup of ~4TB. After
that though, I never notice it uploading the incremental backups.

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walrus01
Sort of going off on a tangent to Backblaze's post. I know big enterprises
still use a lot of LTO tape. But the total market worldwide for LTO drives and
LTO tapes (two manufacturers, total!) can't be very large compared to the
number of spinning rust type hard drives that are manufactured yearly, and
sold into distribution channels. Economy of scale matters a lot. If you can
buy a product that's manufactured in the dozens of millions and piggyback on
everyone else's purchases, it may be a better solution.

Backblaze's system architecture is fairly failure tolerant, so they use a huge
number of "consumer" grade drives that would cause enterprise people to run
away screaming. They're successful with it.

I know a number of people who have self built ZFS servers in the $2000 to
$18,000 price range, who also use consumer grade drives with a failure rate no
higher than the expensive $450 enterprise drives.

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jonatron
A small video production company I worked for used LTO tape for archiving
footage, so it's not just big enterprise.

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walrus01
Small sample size, but I consult on backend systems for post-production houses
/ special effects contractors in the Vancouver BC film industry, and tape is
exceedingly rare.

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RcouF1uZ4gsC
BackBlaze is absolutely genius at marketing. They are one of the few companies
that know how to produce “ads” that are both super interesting and useful
while explaining how their service can solve a real need.

I absolutely love their hard disk stats as well. Whenever I read one of their
articles, I get the warm fuzzy feeling that these people really know their
stuff and that my data would be safe with them.

Kudos for building great service and marketing in such a useful and
informative manner.

~~~
ghaff
It's really a textbook example of content marketing. Mind you, they have a
good service to go with it. But the visibility they get from things like their
hard drive stats is worth a huge amount.

~~~
bitexploder
People severely underrate content marketing in my experience. Or misunderstand
it. Just having a popular technical article on your business domain is good.
You don’t have to do anything clever in the article itself marketing your
business.

~~~
macintux
I miss Basho: we’d frequently post quality distributed systems content on our
blog, and running the RICON distributed systems conference was quite a
privilege.

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Scoundreller
> By March 2019, US import bans of LTO products of both manufacturers were in
> place.

Never underestimate the profit of a suitcase full of tapes hurtling through
the airways?

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gruez
Are you suggesting smuggling in LTO-8 tapes?

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core-questions
No, but I know a guy, and he can meet you in the alleyway

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duxup
The alleyway in the ocean?

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Scoundreller
AlleyExpress.

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AtlasBarfed
Do any cloud backups provide sneakernet uploads by mailing drives to them and
they return them?

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aianus
Yes:
[https://aws.amazon.com/snowball/disk/details/](https://aws.amazon.com/snowball/disk/details/)

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briffle
You can go much, much bigger, like a petabyte at a time...
[https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/](https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/)

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dheera
This is the kind of thing that really makes me _want_ to have somebody please
clone and sell them out of a country that doesn't really care about patent
infringement. They can at least supply tapes until the big guys sort out their
petty battle. They'll both be sorry for suing each other after this third
party takes all their revenue for the time being.

Users shouldn't be the ones getting punished for this.

~~~
votepaunchy
> have somebody please clone and sell them out of a country that doesn't
> really care about patent infringement

How would one “sell out of a country” when it’s an import ban?

“By March 2019, US import bans of LTO products of both manufacturers were in
place.”

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macintux
It’s not obvious from that sentence whether the ban is on LTO-8 in general, or
just from Sony and Fuji. It’s quite possible it’s only the latter.

~~~
dfrage
From previous reading, both are banned, Fuji recently:
[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/05/31/lto_patent_case_hit...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/05/31/lto_patent_case_hits_lto8_supply/)
(Although previously I remember it was Sony that declined to start up LTO-8
production, after getting their importation of similar BaFe LTO-7 tapes
banned, maybe _el Reg_ got which was which confused in the article.)

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jgalt212
Who's the biggest/most security conscious company that does cloud backup at
machines not controlled by themselves?

i.e. it would very interesting to me, and a huge endorsement of the process
itself, if Google did some cloud back up on Azure or vice versa.

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fulafel
Tldr: it's about patent related US import ban of tapes and voluntary vendor
initiated US import stop of drives, not general unavailability.

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PaulHoule
gr8. Sony and Fuji have a fight and they'll both lose since people committed
to LTO tape will move on. Gotta love those patent lawyers.

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pkaye
What will they move to?

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gruez
The cloud (company who wrote this article) or hard drives.

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pkaye
Can hard drives store long term like LTO tapes?

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kalleboo
The article (which is obviously biased keep in mind) makes the argument that
even LTO isn't really long term due to compatibility issues between tape
generations - you have to keep migrating your tapes since new machines can't
read older tape densities.

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dfrage
Realistically, companies keep making older generation tape drives for a long
time, for example, HP LTO-5 drives are still widely available from normal
vendors like Newegg. And except for one discontinuity that's pretty clearly
due to the change from metal particulate to BaFe, which is at the heart of
this patent dispute, LTO offers two generation back read capability, and one
generation back write capability: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-
Open#Compatibility](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-
Open#Compatibility)

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lallysingh
Does this reduce the prices of lto8 drives?

