On Wed, 5 Aug 2020 18:52:47 -0400, Yousuf Khan
wrote:

On 8/4/2020 11:27 AM, Mark Perkins wrote:
On Tue, 4 Aug 2020 03:28:02 -0400, Yousuf Khan
wrote:

On 7/19/2020 11:04 PM, Mark Perkins wrote:
I've had a very similar experience, on more than one occasion. The tape
recorder looks like it's doing its thing and the folks say they're doing
what they're supposed to do, like putting on a fresh tape each night at
midnight and doing the periodic routine maintenance, but when you get a
call asking you to load yesterday's tape and it's empty, your heart sinks.

Have you never used an enterprise-class tape carousels or robotic tape
arrays?

No, and I'm not likely to at this point. Those systems were obsolete at
least 20 years ago, although I'm sure there are a few holdouts here and
there. The few that might still be in operation are just waiting to be
replaced with modern technology.

Since when? I don't think you know how important these are to enterprise
backup solutions.

Correct. I've been in several hundred different data centers over the past
7 years, and a lesser number of data centers over the 20 years before that.
I've seen a lot of drive arrays but I haven't seen a single tape array
since about the late 1990s. I'm primarily describing my own experience when
I say that tape is virtually obsolete. When you say there are still tape
backup systems out there in production somewhere, I don't doubt what you're
saying. I'm just saying they're rare, while drive backup arrays are beyond
common.

Millions of dollars are spent every year on installing
new arrays, and hundreds of thousands are spent on tape media. They're
read and write performance is much higher than HDD's when talking about
serial access.

Sorry, I'm not buying that. Even with the silly qualifier, "when talking
about serial access."

This is not something that is legacy, and going down, the
expenditures are going up, because it's the best way to backup data.

Well don't keep it a secret. Let the good folks over at Backblaze know.
While you're at it, cc the good folks at Amazon's AWS and Microsoft's Azure
organizations. They're all wasting their money on hard drives.