Give the little guys credit for trying. They just haven't been building
drives and media for 40+ years and lack practical experience. Maybe in
another 20-30 years they'll finally get it right. :-)
Rick
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Dave Reinken wrote:
Anybody read the Mainframe Executive article on the death of tape as a
backup media? The guy writing it used to work for STK and Sun, and now
works for disk-based backup vendors. He says the following:
- 15% of all backups fail (my experience < 1%)
- 10-50% of all restores from tape fail (my experience <1%)
- 40-50% failure when restoring data from tape > 5 years (my experience
again is <1%)
So what are you guys seeing out there? Do we really have mainframe tape
failure rates in the double-digits percentwise? If we do, then the guy is
right and tape is dead, but I just don't buy those figures. What say you?
Even on 3420's, of which I have seen a few snapped tapes, error rates
were much lower than these ones. I would be curious as to where he came
up with these numbers. Given the thousands of 3420's I used, the error
rate on those was below 1%, and on 3480, 3490, 3490E and 3590 tapes the
rates have been far below 1%.
On various tape systems I've used to back up PC workstations and network
servers, on the other hand, I have definitely seen high error rates,
although probably much closer to 15-20% at the highest than the up to
50% he reports.
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