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Tale of the Tape: Beware of Wind Quality

Originally appeared on Enterprise Storage Forum. Click here for the full article. A little more than a year ago, a customer told me his company was going to write tapes remotely over an OC-3 connection. The tape drive being used was the StorageTek T9940B, which has a native transfer rate of 30 MB/sec and can […]

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thumbnail Henry Newman
Henry Newman
Jan 10, 2005
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Originally appeared on Enterprise Storage Forum. Click here for the full article.

A little more than a year ago, a customer told me his company was going to write tapes remotely over an OC-3 connection. The tape drive being used was the StorageTek T9940B, which has a native transfer rate of 30 MB/sec and can support up to about a 68 MB/sec transfer rate with compression. The average compression this customer was seeing was about 1.5 to 1, so he was running the local tape drives at about 45 MB/sec.

After factoring in packetization and contention, we figured that we would be very lucky to see 15 MB/sec on this OC-3 line, and would likely see about 6 MB/sec. I cautioned them that this was a bad idea.

Tape wind quality can be a problem on local Fibre Channel networks, but the problem is exacerbated when replicating directly to tape remotely…

Take a look at these three photos. Can you spot the differences?

Enterprise Storage: Tape Wind Quality

Learn how to spot potential problems early on, and how to ensure good wind quality. Click here for the rest of Henry Newman’s guide to wind quality and how it factors into the longevity of your data.

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thumbnail Henry Newman

Henry Newman has been a contributor to TechnologyAdvice websites for more than 20 years. His career in high-performance computing, storage and security dates to the early 1980s, when Cray was the name of a supercomputing company rather than an entry in Urban Dictionary. After nearly four decades of architecting IT systems, he recently retired as CTO of a storage company’s Federal group, but he rather quickly lost a bet that he wouldn't be able to stay retired by taking a consulting gig in his first month of retirement.

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