Your point is well-taken. It is easy to say that LTO4 media will be
good for 30 years, but it would be crazy to put LTO4 tapes in a vault
and, even under perfect storage conditions, expect to just pull them out
and read them.
Will anybody have LTO4 drives then? No way. Even if you kept a LTO4
tape drive in the vault, would you expect it to work after being stored
for 30 years? No way. Do you think you will be able to get a FC
adapter or switch to attach it to your server in 30 years? No way.
We use TSM for archiving all the time, and we have 30 year retention
requirements, too. But when we have to replace LTO4 with LTO5 or LTO6
or whatever it is a few years from now, we plan to use scripts and a
plan of continuous "move data"s to migrate all our archive data to the
new media. Last year we migrated an environment with 3500 tapes from
3592 media to LTO4, and it took a few months to do, but we did it
without any problems, and without loosing any data.
Of course, I am not so naive that I think TSM will be around for 30
years either, but I plan to retire before then :-). Just kidding. If
and when IBM announces end of life for TSM, we will have to migrate the
data to some other archiving system. But at least when that happens, we
will have it on media we know we can still read.
Best Regards,
John D. Schneider
Phone: 314-364-3150
Cell: 314-750-8721
Email: John.Schneider AT Mercy DOT net
-----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 3:25 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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