At least one member of the "tape is dead" crowd blogged that Google must have been using virtual tape because "Google probably doesn't have a giant, cavern-spanning data center hidden beneath some volcano in the Pacific that contains acres and acres of reel-to-reel tape machines spinning away day and night backing up your data." And, "In fact, EMC recently launched a technology that obsoletes tape backups entirely with Data Domain de-duplication for everything except a total meltdown."
Frankly, I'm tired of people who haven't worked with large tape systems (or tape at all) for a while and claim that "tape is too slow to live." Many of the organizations I work with have just the opposite problem: They can't keep an LTO-5 feed at 200MBytes per second or more backing up a single Windows or Linux server.
Large data users like CERN rely on massive tape libraries to hold their data. In fact, one of what Spectra Logic calls a mid-range tape library, the T680, can save data at 12TBytes per hour and hold 2 petabytes on 680 LTO-5 tapes. The biggest Data Domain box, a DD890, is only a little faster at 14TBytes per hour and would have to get 5-to-1 deduplication to hold as much data. The big libraries, like Spectra's Tfinity, hold hundreds of petabytes, and Oracle's T8500 holds an exabyte and can transfer 500-plus terabytes per hour.
So, the cloud isn't perfect, though it's better than Akbar and Jeff in IT. SLAs are good, but you still bear the risk, and tape is not dead. Good lessons all.
