[Brian]

Imation is starting to ship their next generation tape cartridges, the Imation LTO Ultrium Generation 5. The tape cartridges feature nearly double the storage capacity of the previous generation tape, increased data transfer rates, and a new partitioning functionality.

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[stevecs]

Yeah, just got the announcement from Quantum a couple days ago about their new LTO-5 drives as well. Looks like they slowed down the spec even more and decreased tape capacity. Originally it was planned for doubling both speed & capacity per generation (so 240MB/s native on LTO5 and 1.6TB of space). That was reduced to 180MB/s native and still 1.6TB during various discussions (mainly as I hear large business were limited in their infrastructure to Gbit links so ~125MiB/s transfers of data. Why constrain the drive due to places that couldn't upgrade their infrastructure who knows). Now it's been reduced to 140MB/s and 1.5TB. At LTO-4 you have 120MB/s and 800GB capacity. So this does not really do anything to reduce backup windows at all. You have to purchase more tape drives. Only thing this does is reduce the number of tapes needed by a little less than 50% but at a price premium (both for the drive and for the next year at least tapes themselves being about 3x the cost of LTO4).

Just a reference note that this technology has a non recoverable bit error rate of 1:10^17 bits (still very good) but for enterprise use the T10000A/B tapes have 1:10^19 bit error rates (granted they are also /much/ more expensive).

[Brian]

I understand why you wouldn't run out and upgrade everything now, but if you were say evaluating a new system, would the advancements in capacity and the little bit of speed be enough to get you to gen5?

[stevecs]

If I was buying today, I would be hard pressed to purchase a Gen5 out the door. Even if it came to be that I managed to talk the vendor to give me the Gen5 drive at the Gen4 cost I would still only use Gen4 tapes due to the tape cost. (~$120/tape is killer when you can get Gen4 tapes for $30-35/each). I like the point on reducing the number of tapes, but let's really face it data never SHRINKS. You'll always be playing catchup.

Realistically, probably would look at a library that would come with the ability to have multiple Gen4 drives (to reduce backup window) that could be upgraded to Gen5 later, realizing that this is only really feasible in large libraries (>75-100 slots) as smaller libraries the cost of the tape drive itself is about the cost of the library without any drives.

It took a good 18 months or so for the Gen4 tapes to drop down to reasonable levels and just recently (say past 6 months or so) really dropped down to the current prices. Don't get me wrong, I like having high capacity (actually would love to have 3TB native now) but it has to come with equal increase in performance otherwise your windows are killer. Who wants to spend 6-7+ days backing up 50TB on a single drive? While that's going on you still have production incrementals that need backing up as well. There are some new techs like virtual fulls but that's slow getting out there and would you really trust doing a full just once and never again?

[Brian]

I shudder to think about regularly completing week-long backups...at least these puny websites don't require much more than a large USB stick if you want an off-site backup