Poll; Tape drives

[Christopher Browne]

On Fri, Mar 7, 2008 at 6:05 PM, Madison Kelly <linux-5ZoueyuiTZhBDgjK7y7TUQ at public.gmane.org> wrote:
>    I guess what I am getting at is; I suspect (hope?) that people with
>  more modest needs will consider my program, and then from there it will
>  "trickle up" as it matures over the years. By the time it would be
>  considered for use in a big company it will have had a lot of time to
>  grow which, in turn, will let me see what demands there are for
>  features, including hardware support.

The thing is, the customers with "mainframe-like" requirements will
quite likely continue to diverge away from you and the "norm" in terms
of their requirements.  I would NOT assume that you'll get to a point
where they become interested.

More likely, "success" would be defined by the market reaching a point
where a hardware model involving "hard drives in small cases" is
representative of a meaningful portion of the marketplace.

Lennart fairly nicely parameterized things, whether you look at things
strictly or not; tape drives and tapes are sufficiently expensive that
they don't have a large "edge" over disk storage.

Something he *didn't* point out (in any detail) is that the pricing of
disk drives has been falling over the last number of years, concurrent
with increases in capacity, and at a much higher rate than tape
capacity has grown.  And it is not obvious that tapes have been
getting cheaper the way disk drives have.  Indeed, the cost of the
tape drive you need to back up a 1TB drive is a lot higher than the
cost of the one needed to back up 4GB drives, once upon a time, which
points at an *increase* in costs.

I used to be able to buy a $150 tape drive that would back up my hard
drive, back when I had hundreds of MB of storage that cost me a couple
hundred dollars.

In contrast, today, the tape drive required to back up 1TB of disk
costs around $3500, which is around 10x the cost of the disk.  There's
a valid perspective for saying that tape drives have gotten on the
order of 20x as expensive as they used to be, at least, in comparison
with the way that 500GB of storage, today, is about the same price as
500MB used to be "in the good old days."

I don't see tape getting cheaper over time; there is no "commodity
market" causing there to be billions of units sold so as to draw
prices down.

In 15 years, it could easily be the case that the tape drive required
to back up your system will cost $30K, based on the progression we
have seen thus far.  The people prepared to spend that will be
prepared to spend a *LOT* of money on highly mature archival software.
 It's only an easy target to vendors that have already invested
billions in it...



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