I do agree, having the tapedrives around _could_ be important. I know
of at least one environment that was able to produce the media that
stores the data, but no drives. But then again, they only had to
retain the data, not the infra to access it.

On May 5, 2009, at 22:35 , Kelly Lipp wrote:

To me the problem is having the drives around and more importantly,
the interfaces to the drives.  I think that probably the best bet is
to plan on "archiving" a TSM server with a drive along with the
media periodically.  Snap off the last database backup, restore it
on the to be archived server (a good test in itself), and store the
whole kit together.  If one needs to retrieve an archive, fire up
the archived server, query the database to determine what tape is
required, get it, retrieve the data and put the whole mess away.

The other way to do this would be to migrate the archived data to
new tape media as you march through time.  I like this approach as
that will have the double advantage of refreshing and verifying the
data on those tapes.  One could shelve the media in the archive
pools and do this on a very controller basis when the media
changes.  Lots of data movement potentially, but it would become a
nicely verified process that your auditors could look at to help
ensure compliance.  It's one thing to say we're doing and quite
another to show we're doing it.  Having the archive data more
readily retrievable has obvious benefits as well.

Kelly Lipp
CTO
STORServer, Inc.
485-B Elkton Drive
Colorado Springs, CO 80907
719-266-8777 x7105
www.storserver.com


-----Original Message-----
From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On
Behalf Of Huebschman, George J.
Sent: Tuesday, May 05, 2009 2:25 PM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: Re: [ADSM-L] LTO for long term archiving

Does anyone have 25 year old tape media or tape drives around?
Will you stil be able to use LTOx media in 25 years?

-----Original Message-----
From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On
Behalf Of
Thomas Denier
Sent: Tuesday, May 05, 2009 4:11 PM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: [ADSM-L] LTO for long term archiving

I work for a large hospital. I have been asked to investigate possible
configurations for archiving something between a few hundred terabytes
and a petabyte of data for 25 years. This would be clinical records
that
we need to keep in case of a malpractice suit. The retention period is
25 years because there are two ways we can get sued for alleged
malpractice involving a pediatric patient. The parents or guardians
have
a seven year window of opportunity to file suit, starting at the
time of
the alleged malpractice. The patient has a seven year window of
opportunity, starting at his or her 18th birthday. In principle, the
retention period should vary depending on patient age, but nobody I
have
talked to so far thinks it is practical to sort records in this way;
they want a uniform retention period that covers the worst case
scenario
(a patient allegedly harmed as a newborn suing just before the end of
his or her seven year window).

As far as I can tell, the most expensive part of such a
configuration is
the media, and LTO media will cost about a third as much as the most
economical MagStar media (extended length 3592 volumes read and
written
with TS1130 drives). With the sort of workload described above I don't
expect any difficulty staying within the recommended limit on the
number
of times an LTO volume passes over the tape heads. Are there any other
reasons to be nervous about using LTO for long term archives?

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