Soon, I will be upgrading our backup system to meet the needs of current and future storage expansion projects.  I considered a number of options, including disk-based and cloud-based backups.  With the recent influx of malware and cryptoware, it was determined that backed up data is much safer in a cold medium such as tape, vs a hot medium like disk.  Cloud-based backup is economical from a backup point of view, but should the need to restore ever arise, costs for downloading and restoring an entire backup server are astronomical.  This was compared to the 6 year lifespan for a typical tape backup robot.

Our current (soon to be previous) backup server had 4TB of staging space (to prevent tape scrubbing).  We have 228 robotically automated tape slots using LTO-5, which provides 1.5TB per tape.  We have 3 LTO-5 drives.  Current uncompressed backup capacity is 342TB.

The new solution will provide a server with 8TB of staging space, while also providing faster disks.  This is important for a number of reasons.  Our new LTO-7 drives write data much faster, and also have a capacity of 6.0TB per tape, uncompressed.  We will have the same slot configuration — 228 robotically automated slots.  The system will start with 2 LTO-7 drives for cost reasons, and we will add two additional drives in the next fiscal year.  In addition to the increased performance and reliability advantages, the system will provide us with an uncompressed capacity of 1.4PB.

Once this is in place, I will begin to add some new and larger storage systems.  These will be beneficial particularly for cryoem and xray data as these sets continue to grow in resolution.

Happy Computing.