W dniu 25.01.2025 o 07:19, Brian Westerman pisze:
You could have you network attached storage located anywhere you want.
No. TVC aka disk cache in VTS (most vendors) cannot be any storage you
choose.
Obviously you have not thought this through. Moving physical tapes costs money
and puts those tapes in danger every time they are touched. They can be
dropped, stolen, get wet, etc.
Yes, tape can be stolen, dropped, etc.
However tapes can be encrypted - one problem less.
Yes, even encrypted tapes can be stolen. Or dropped. Or get wet. Or read...
However we have special cases for that. Which can be sealed. And it is
harder to get wet.
Now the advantage, which can be considered HUGE: tapes can be moved.
Easily moved. Single case may contain ~500TB of uncompressed data,
~1.5PB compressed (before encryption). Regular passenger car can move
multiple petabytes of data, secured with encryption. It is low profile,
it can be hidden, moved to a vault, the place can be changed anytime, no
infrastructure is needed, just closed room, etc.
Maybe it sounds ridiculous, but it is not, when a war is just abroad.
And yes, we have no war in Poland, but many organisations implemented
such tape vault. Where? Usually the address is known for very few
employees. However I'm pretty sure it is on the West, many times abroad.
An address or addresses.
The advent of VTS systems made all of those problems ( which are real and
happen all the time), dissolve, and you would be creating them all over again.
Again, NO. The first VTS purpose was to manage huge (at the time)
capacity of MAGSTAR drives - 10/30GB per cart. The problem was tape
utilisation which was ~30% avg on 3490E and shrank to even 2-3%.
VTS was a way to fill up the carts. Of course during the years some
other features were introduced.
However *PHYSICAL* tape export is still one of the features. You can
export a set of virtual volumes to a TS1160 (TS1170 is still not yet
supported). Then you can take a case with a bunch of 3592-JE carts and
go to any datacenter which has a VTS. Import the carts and restore all
your logical (virtual) tapes. And then run stand-alone ADRDSSU (ICKDSF
as well, but it is no longer required) to restore you system disks. And
the IPL your tech system on vanilla new equipment. Yes, before that you
also have to do some things, but all the information you need for that
can be kept on small USB-stick, which you also put to the case.
--
Radoslaw Skorupka
Lodz, Poland
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