The article isnt talking about backups. It's talking about long-term data preservation and storage. While those can be configured to be the same thing, the way the article presents things that's not the case for the LHC data.

Regardless, NAS/SAN is a very viable solution for backups. Why duplicate your full dataset for every full backup you retain and exponentially increase your tape count, when you can do one full backup ever and only keep the incremental changes from that point on? Why pay someone to pick up tapes for offsite data protection, pay them to store it, pay them to retrieve it, and wait for as long is it takes for someone to get a tape that MIGHT have the specific data you need restored, when you can replicate the few gigs of incremental change weekly on a several hundred terabyte dataset that is actually new or changed to a site not just in the same city (as is usually the case of tapes) but to another state or even another country? And have the entire history of backups online and available in a few seconds and from a fail-over location? If you have a city-wide disaster and you've got your tapes just down the street in a "vault", you're probably screwed. If it's 1000 miles away your business/research group/agency can recover.

Every point the article makes about why tape is an advantage is easily disqualified by anyone with basic understanding of the technologies. I mean seriously, the article actually argues that a tape is superior because if a tape snaps it can be spliced back together and you only lose "a few hundred megabytes", whereas if you lose a TB disk drive you lose the whole TB. If you're too fucking stupid to use striping then you deserve to lose the data.

It further argues that you dont have to pay to power tapes. Sure, true. You just have to pay to ship it around, pay for it in terms of floorspace to store it, and do so exponentially more so than disk (see dedup argument above). But the article aslo proves perfect ignorance of NAS/SAN tech allowing for very low cost idle disks. So the disks remain spun down until/unless the data on them is accessed. There is minimal cooling/power costs associated unless you're accessing the data regularly over the whole of the storage, and if you're doing that you've further negated any professed benefit from tapes.

And the article also gives no consideration for technology refresh for "long term" data storage, which shows an amazing lack of foresight. If all your data is on LTO tape, for instance, what happens in 5 years? Do you copy all that data from old tape tech to new tape tech? Or do you keep all or some subset of the old tape hardware online and available so that you can still access the old tapes? If the latter, do you start paying more and more for the support on that hardware? Or do you risk failures that you may or may not be able to find replacement parts to repair? If it's the former, is it easier to copy the pb's of data that the LHC project is describing from one tape tech to another? Or from one disk storage tray to another?

The more I consider the article the more it pisses me off because it's so flat out false. There might be a very small set of scenarios in which the article's view is viable, but they are by far the exception rather than the norm.

Who, exactly, are you refering to that is storing TBs of data on unattached drives that are in some form other than SAN or NAS? If you have data sets that are being regularly accessed that are in the TBs in size and you're not using SAN or NAS then your IT manager needs to be flogged. Or you're a small company on a shoestring budget that couldnt afford to replace the tapes you're wearing out even if you could afford to purchase a high-capacity, high-performance tape changer in the first place. I mean, even if you had 100 laptops with USB drives attached holding the data you're talking about some simple AD permissions would allow a person to script retrieval of the data that would be faster than tapes could perform.

The capability of retrieving that data efficiently has little do with the medium, and much more to do with the format that the data is in. If it's in a standardized format it can be easily searched and retrieved concurrently with scripting. If it's not in a standardized format then your tape search is going to be a colosal cluster****.

SAN/NAS negates your argument entirely because all the data is in one pooled location. Which is then protected by a backup paradigm even more easily, and deduplication even more easily applied to make the storage footprint of backups minute compared to tape.

It's not an obvious article. In many respects its a false article.

If the only consideration is "what is the cheapest media to put data on", then perhaps the article is valid. But there are few businesses, institutions or government agencies that would claim that as the single consideration.

Sure, a tape vendor is going to tell you that the delay to access the data on a tape is only going to be a few seconds if you buy their high capacity robotic changers. But that's going to assume that the data you want is at the beginning of 1 tape. In the real world that's rarely going to be true. When you need to correlate data from 100 different test scenarios or days or whatever, and the one piece of data you need is 1mb per test/day/etc., that 100mb could easily be at any place on 100 tapes. Now you're no longer talking about a load time for a tape. That's up to 100 load times, and then compounded by the forward to the sectors you need. A tape might load and be capable of streaming from the beginning of the tape in a 3-5 seconds, but you can forward through 100's of gigs in 3-5 seconds. And unless someone is going to suggest that you have 100 drives in the library, then only a handful of the 100s of mbs that you need are being retrieved concurrently. Now consider the impact of potentially dozens, or even hundreds of users attempting similair accesses concurrently.

And It's all well and good to spend $X to dump a petabyte of data onto tape. But if you intend to geographically seperate that live dataset from your backup copy, and you need to regularly access and search the data, then tapes kinda suck and the costs climb significantly.

Then you can start factoring in the impact of deduplication technology. if you can have a year's worth of daily iterative change of 1PB of data on 1.5PB of disk storage using dedup, then it's far cheaper than having 12PB of full backups on tapes (assuming you're only keeping the monthly fulls) and paying to courier them offsite , and pay to store them for that 1years retention period. With dedup/replication tech you can also keep a remote live copy sync'd with your local live copy with minor site-to-site traffic after the initial seeding, providing offsite protection and an alternate access location for the dataset and load-balancing possibilities that tapes cannot provide without enormous hardware investment and costs, even if you could push all the data over a WAN. You cant really dedup data on tapes without presenting the possibility of having to load several tapes to recompile/rehydrate/[enter your prefered tech jargon here] even a single file.

Lets not even broach the subject of litigation and court ordered holds on data, where the costs dictated from using tapes skyrocket.

So yeah, if you want to have one copy of the data, that cant be indexed or search easily, cannot remove duplication, and is wholly unprotected, then the article might be valid. If you want to use even the most basic of industry data management standards for a data set that has anything more than zero value, then things start getting foggy in a big hurry.

By a drill press, a metal lathe, and a few other mundane metal-working tools, and you dont have to wait. You could make all those things easily enough in your garage, without any form of licensing, registrations or certifications.

Oh, crap. I let the secret out. Quick, we need media hysteria and knee-jerk legislation, ASAP.

Or print one!

By definition every liberal is required to oppose the 2nd amendment to exactly the same degree as being a libertarian requires that they both own and expirement with firearms.

Next time I mean to point out the ignorance of stereotypical generalizations with a sarcastic stereotypical generalization of my own, I will include a disclaimer for the sarcastically challenged.

The purpose of the NRA precludes them being at odds with gun manufacturers you moron. The NRA is entirely about gun education, safety and freedom, and people that value those things pay dues to ensure that the NRA can do those things. There's no way to pursue that agenda without it directly benefiting gun manufacturers.

Telling people what they may own, use, make or design certainly doesnt screams "FREEDOM", does it? But obviously your point was never that people should actually be free. They need to STFU and be controlled.

Hell, I'm thinking I might be able to convince my wife I need a laser-scintering printer so that I can fix all her things more easily than convincing her I need an RC helicopter. I'll just print the copter.

Correct. Because it's not calculated as a crime when the government uses guns to "punishes" the citizens.

Do you honestly believe that Venezuala banned guns to prevent the citizens shooting each other?

The latter being able to create much more decisively destructive devices, without using any specialized tools, and from mundance materials at any Home Depot.

How did you pack so much ignorance into so few words?

Exactly the same thing that would happen when a person gets a roll of duct tape , a spool of bailing twine, a box of thumbtacks and a donkey through the same checkpoint. They build a data scrambler that doubles as a remote control syncronized with the flight control tower, you realize that you're watching a stupid episode of 24 with McGuiver cameo, and you turn off the fucking television.

Considerably fewer than self-righteous liberals who are murdered because they refuse to defend themselves effectively, and refuse to do so out of deliberate ignorance.

Because there's no moral outrage to be leveraged against a political scarecrow that way. 3D printers have been used in untold ways to improve lives, but most people couldnt care less. They allow the media and hysteric nannies to portray a TOOL no different than a lathe or drill, as the most evil device ever concieved by man.