LTO-8 Library and Linear Tape File System

H

Hammer!

Limp Gawd
Joined
Nov 25, 2011
Messages
155
Hi, was wondering if the group here can help guide me in the right direction:

1) I have 75-100 TB's of data than I need to keep online or near-line.
2) These data sets do not change and seldom deleted
3) Currently, we are storing them in a large RAID 6 array, and have a duplicate array for backup
4) My worry is both array's will fail leading to data loss

Is there a way to access a LTO-8 library like it's a hard drive? We don't need super high speed access since we can copy the data sets as we use them to local harddrives.

I don't know too much about LTO tape libraries, but was thinking this will be a good use of tape storage.

Thanks!
 
I haven't used tape in this way, but you have to keep in mind that seek time on a tape is measured in seconds to minutes, not milliseconds. You would want a workflow that would be ok with a significant delay while the tape is seeked to the right point, and then the data is read off into something with random access properties. An LTO-8 tape is almost a kilometer of tape in a cartridge. If you wanted to eliminate the seek times, you could have one tape per data set, and keep the tapes seeked to the start, but that may become much more expensive than live disks.

There might be a reliability issue if you are constantly accessing the tapes, they're not really designed for constant access.
 
I use HP Ultrium 3000 external SAS2 drive. It is LTO-5 and it is first generation which supports LTFS. I use Windows 7 x64 and drive is recognized with normal drive letter. Everything works fine, data copy is done via exporer/copy/paste :) Of course backed up data is not changed often, so you should consider this type of backup as "long term archival"
 
trackersoft said:
I use HP Ultrium 3000 external SAS2 drive. It is LTO-5 and it is first generation which supports LTFS. I use Windows 7 x64 and drive is recognized with normal drive letter. Everything works fine, data copy is done via exporer/copy/paste :) Of course backed up data is not changed often, so you should consider this type of backup as "long term archival"
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Thanks. That’s very helpful. does any know if a tape library will also be seen by Windows this way? Eg., can it be mounted and accessed by a Drive letter? Is each tape in the library a different drive letter or does it show up as a single drive letter spanning the capacity of all the tapes in the library? Either way, how does one control the mounting/unmounting of the tapes in the library?

Yes, no doubt this will be slow...we don’t switch datasets everyday and so I’m thinking copying over to disk the ones we need won’t be the end of the world.
 
Hammer! said:
Thanks. That’s very helpful. does any know if a tape library will also be seen by Windows this way? Eg., can it be mounted and accessed by a Drive letter? Is each tape in the library a different drive letter or does it show up as a single drive letter spanning the capacity of all the tapes in the library? Either way, how does one control the mounting/unmounting of the tapes in the library?

Yes, no doubt this will be slow...we don’t switch datasets everyday and so I’m thinking copying over to disk the ones we need won’t be the end of the world.
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It looks like HP has a product called Tape as NAS which sounds like exactly what I am looking for. Does anyone have experience with this product? How much does it cost? Thanks, Hammer
 
With 100tb you need a storage library, managing such amount of data just with lto drive will be PITA.
 
There is a product by Spectra Logic that is called Black Pearl which will turn tapes into a near line FS. Pretty amazing stuff. I was investigating it as a way to use it as a NAS for DB backup dumps at my last gig. But I didn't have a chance to really investigate it. I wanted to use it a dumping ground backup target, or I wanted to move "cold" files rarely accessed(files older then X amount of time) with stub technology to it. Or files purely for regulatory retention purposes over to it. It was an LTO6 shop and performance claimed at the time was decent but not awesome. With LTO8, and the right FC network to back it? Bet it would be more then acceptable.
 
kdh said:
There is a product by Spectra Logic that is called Black Pearl which will turn tapes into a near line FS. Pretty amazing stuff. I was investigating it as a way to use it as a NAS for DB backup dumps at my last gig. But I didn't have a chance to really investigate it. I wanted to use it a dumping ground backup target, or I wanted to move "cold" files rarely accessed(files older then X amount of time) with stub technology to it. Or files purely for regulatory retention purposes over to it. It was an LTO6 shop and performance claimed at the time was decent but not awesome. With LTO8, and the right FC network to back it? Bet it would be more then acceptable.
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Yeah, that looks cool, but probably not within budget...anyone have experience with HP's Tape as NAS, or t-NAS?
 
Honestly I dont think Lto tapes as nas is a good idea. Single click at wrong place in file manager will cost 10-15 mins delay. They're is probably tons of other unknown "underwater rocks" in such workflow.
Large nas and tape library for backup/archive. Well constructed and maintained raid array with regular tape backup is what gives me the best sleep.
 
Hammer! said:
Yeah, that looks cool, but probably not within budget...anyone have experience with HP's Tape as NAS, or t-NAS?
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If you are rocking LTO8 drives in a tape robot, your budget should be fairly healthy. The killer with most tape as an FS is going to be your licensing and software maintenance.
 
dedobot said:
Honestly I dont think Lto tapes as nas is a good idea. Single click at wrong place in file manager will cost 10-15 mins delay. They're is probably tons of other unknown "underwater rocks" in such workflow.
Large nas and tape library for backup/archive. Well constructed and maintained raid array with regular tape backup is what gives me the best sleep.
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lotta valid points here with this post and you are absolutely right. Unfortunately today this second, tape with out a shadow of a doubt, is still cheaper per gig then spinning disk. I did a cost comparison of using either Isilon or Data Domain(both with dedupe and compression turned on) as backup targets vs a SpectraLogic 950 with 6 LTO6 drives and the cost of tapes. Tape was pennies per gig, and if I ran out of tape space.. It was cheaper and easier to just buy more tapes vs trays of disks / or nodes of storage. I absolutely hated bringing in that robot.. But I couldn't argue the cost, and TCO of it.
 
kdh said:
If you are rocking LTO8 drives in a tape robot, your budget should be fairly healthy. The killer with most tape as an FS is going to be your licensing and software maintenance.
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Budget's not huge...was going to buy used and it looks like HP has based library software for free. It's just I can't find any info on tNAS (which I assume is not free). After some digging, it sounds like HP licenses it from Qstar...does anyone have any experience. I guess it can't be all that good if no one here uses it!
 
Usually tape libraries comes bundled with license of some "lite" version of proprietary software. In mine case with two tanberg's magnum exabyte 224 lto4 and lto6 for the second, it was "Symantec back up exec" 2010 and 2014 respectively.
Always keep in mind that robotic libraries are delicate and prone to failures. Both Tandbergs had to travel to the service shop, abroad. Not a pleasure thing when projects pending. But they still have not alternative for long time backup/archive.
 
LTO is not a good random access solution. Use it for archival only. If you need to recover data restore it to a hard drive.
 
Hammer! said:
Budget's not huge...was going to buy used and it looks like HP has based library software for free. It's just I can't find any info on tNAS (which I assume is not free). After some digging, it sounds like HP licenses it from Qstar...does anyone have any experience. I guess it can't be all that good if no one here uses it!
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Suckage. =(

Even if you could get it in the door, almost all of those tape as a filesystem solutions all nail you on licensed capacity usage. That'll really murder your budget, more so because it becomes opex and not capex. You're right on that edge from just having to jump in head first or kinda just keep doing what you're doing. Do you know your yearly growth foot print? If you are growing your foot print 10% year over year.. stick with what you are doing. If you are growing that foot print 25% or more year over year.. You might want to rip the bandaid off now, and work on getting a bigger budget. 100tbs is nothing to sneeze at.. but in a short amount of time it could become 300tbs and its ugly to move around.
 
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