{"id":5676,"date":"2015-09-23T07:11:48","date_gmt":"2015-09-22T21:11:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/?p=5676"},"modified":"2018-12-11T12:03:00","modified_gmt":"2018-12-11T02:03:00","slug":"lto-7-and-the-streaming-conundrum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/2015\/09\/23\/lto-7-and-the-streaming-conundrum\/","title":{"rendered":"LTO-7 and the Streaming Conundrum"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The LTO consortium <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lto.org\/2015\/09\/the-lto-program-announces-upcoming-generation-7-specifications-for-licensing\/\" target=\"_blank\">has announced<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>That the&nbsp;LTO Ultrium format generation 7 specifications are now available for licensing by storage mechanism and media manufacturers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>LTO-7 will feature&nbsp;tape capacities of up to 15TB (compressed) and streaming speeds of up to 750MB\/s (compressed). LTO is now&nbsp;working off a 2.5:1 compression ratio \u2013 so those numbers are (uncompressed) 6TB and 300MB\/s.<\/p>\n<p>Don&#8217;t get me wrong \u2013 I&#8217;m not&nbsp;going to launch into a&nbsp;<em>tape is dead<\/em> article here. Clearly it&#8217;s not dead.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/uyDuVCxA5qY\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>That rocket car is impressive. It hit 1,033KM\/h \u2013 Mach <del>9.4<\/del>* \u2013 over a 16KM track. There&#8217;s no denying it&#8217;s&nbsp;<em>fast<\/em>. There&#8217;s also no denying that you couldn&#8217;t just grab it and use it to commute to work. And if you could commute to work using it but there happened to be a small pebble on the track, what would happen?<\/p>\n<p>I do look at LTO increasingly and find myself asking &#8230; how relevant is it for <i>average<\/i> businesses? It&#8217;s fast and it has high capacity \u2013 and this is increasing with the LTO-7 format.&nbsp;Like the rocket car above though,&nbsp;it&#8217;s impressive as long as you only want to go in one direction and&nbsp;you don&#8217;t hit any bumps.<\/p>\n<p>Back when Tape Was King, a new tape format meant a general rush on storage refresh towards the new tape&nbsp;technology in order to get optimum speed and capacity for a hungry backup environment. And&nbsp;backup&nbsp;environments are&nbsp;<em>still hungry<\/em> for capacity and speed, but they&#8217;re&nbsp;<em>also<\/em> hungry for flexibility, something that&#8217;s not as well provided by tape.&nbsp;Except in very particular conditions, tape is no longer seen as the optimum first landing zone for backup data \u2013 and increasingly, it&#8217;s not being seen as the ideal secondary landing zone either. More and more businesses are&nbsp;designing backup strategies around minimising the amount of tape they use in their&nbsp;environment.&nbsp;It&#8217;s not in any way&nbsp;unusual now to see&nbsp;backup processes designed to keep&nbsp;<em>at least<\/em> all of the normal daily\/weekly cycles on disk (particularly if it&#8217;s deduplication storage) and push only the long-term retention backups out to tape.&nbsp;(Tape is even being edged out there for many businesses,&nbsp;<em>but<\/em> I&#8217;ll leave that as a topic for another time.)<\/p>\n<p>Much of the evolution we&#8217;ve seen in backup&nbsp;and recovery functionality has come from developing features around&nbsp;high speed&nbsp;<em>random<\/em> access of backups. Deduplication, highly granular recoveries, mounting from the backup system and even&nbsp;<em>powering on virtual machines<\/em> from backup storage all require one thing in common: disk.&nbsp;As we&#8217;ve come to&nbsp;<em>expect<\/em> that functionality in data protection products, the utility of tape for most&nbsp;organisations has likewise decreased significantly. Recoverability and even access-without-recovery has become a far more crucial&nbsp;consideration in a data protection environment&nbsp;than the amount of data you can fit onto a&nbsp;cartridge.<\/p>\n<p>I have no doubt LTO-7 will win high-praise&nbsp;from many.&nbsp;But like the high speed rocket car video&nbsp;above, I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s your &#8220;daily commute&#8221; data protection vehicle. It clearly has purpose, it clearly has backing, and it clearly has utility. As long as you need to go in a very straight line, don&#8217;t make any changes in direction and&nbsp;don&#8217;t attempt to change your speed too much.<\/p>\n<p>As always, plan your data protection environment around the entire end-to-end data&nbsp;protection process, and the utility of that&nbsp;protected data.<\/p>\n<p>&#8212;<br \/>\n* Oops, Mach 0.94. Thanks, Tony. (That&#8217;ll teach me to blindly copy the details from the original video description.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The LTO consortium has announced: That the&nbsp;LTO Ultrium format generation 7 specifications are now available for licensing by storage mechanism&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3,5,1133],"tags":[301,1203,552,1268,980],"class_list":["post-5676","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-architecture","category-backup-theory","category-best-practice","tag-deduplication","tag-instant-access","tag-lto","tag-lto-7","tag-tape"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pKpIN-1ty","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5676","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5676"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5676\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7425,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5676\/revisions\/7425"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5676"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5676"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}