The ‘T’ word

[Walter Soyka]

[Charles Wannop] “So my question is – “What about Tape?” Is it still an option? Is it affordable?”

Yes, tape is still an option. Now that everyone is acquiring tapelessly, we no longer have camera masters to rely on for re-digitizing old projects, so there’s a lot of renewed interest in data tape backup. As for affordability — I suppose that depends on your budget!

A lot of production companies are using LTO4 (or the newer LTO5 format, released a couple months ago). Cache-A Archive Appliances are boxes that all of the work for you; if you’d prefer to roll out your own hardware, BRU is a popular software solution.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Bob Zelin]

Hi –
I am reviewing the amazing Cache-A Prime LTO4 right now (it’s on my desk), and it is amazing (but it is expensive – 7 grand). It is very easy to use, and does exactly what you want it to do (except put a hole in your wallet).

If you have any specific questions about the Cache-A, just ask !

Bob Zelin

[Walter Soyka]

[Bob Zelin] “If you have any specific questions about the Cache-A, just ask !”

I’ve got three:

How does it handle backups larger than included hard drive?

What metadata is available in the searchable user-interface?

If you have happened to have also used a BRU-based solution, how do they compare?

Thank you, Bob.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Charles Wannop]

Thanks Bob, I just checked the price locally and it is looking more like $12 grand (with a few tapes thrown in) so pretty scary BUT the whole appliance idea seems sooo much better than a bare drive attached to a server… Please excuse my ignorance but how portable are LT04 tapes across different drives and (apart from obvious management/interface differences) software?

Thanks,

Charles

[Bob Zelin]

Hi Charles –
I am not an expert on this subject, but according to Cache-A, the LTO4 tapes are completely compatible with other LTO 4 appliances. Specifically, if someone used Bru to create the LTO 4 tape, this would be compliant with the Cache – A, which means you allegedly can stick in your BRU made LTO4 drive in a CacheA, and it would read it.

The CacheA LTO4 Prime is $6995 retail. The more expensive products that you refer to are the larger LTO5 with a larger internal drive structure. For example, you can get the CacheA Pro with a LTO5 and 4TB of internal drivves. But if all you want is the standard LTO4 CacheA box with the 1 TB internal drive, this is $6995. You can get LTO4 tapes from any mail order computer catalog company on the web. You don’t need to have them “thrown in”. And when you buy the Cache-A, they give you a cleaning tape, and one Fujitsu cartridge.

Bob Zelin

[Bob Zelin]

I am no expert but –

How does it handle backups larger than included hard drive?

REPLY – you can span the tapes, so when you run out of room, it will request the next tape. It states in the manual that for fastest results, you should backup folders from 20 – 60Gigs at a time. As you know, archiving 800 gigs (they say don’t exceed 720 gigs) to the tape will take HOURS. So I can’t imagine that archiving an entire 16TB array is realistic. You do what you do now with SATA drives – backup your projects, not the entire array. But if you want to backup the entire array – the tapes will span – this is part of the software interface, that allows this to happen.

What metadata is available in the searchable user-interface?
REPLY – remember that the CacheA has an internal drive. You are copying your media to an internal SATA drive (or drives) inside the Cache-A. Once this is done, the transfer from this internal drive to the tape happens in the background. When you examine the “VTape” which is the internal drive in the Cache-A, it appears as a single drive on your MAC desktop (just like a firewire drive). You can search it in the MAC browser, or with Spotlight, or with a program like CAT DV. When you pop in a tape to restore, the table of contents (TOC) appears in the Cache-A GUI. You decide what you want to restore, and simply drag it to the VTape, which brings it into the internal hard drive (VTAPE) of the Cache-A. This is sitting on your desktop. You can now drag thiese restored files anywhere you want – no different than you woudl with a firewire drive.

If you have happened to have also used a BRU-based solution, how do they compare?

I am reading about BRU Producers Edition right now. I have never tried it. It looks like they have made it much simplier, with a normal MAC interface. And the price is thousands less than the Cache-A, but your connection is USB2 or SAS (which requires a SAS card). They have bundles that have an ATTO sas card with the BRU PE system, but now it’s on a local computer – its not on your network, iike the Cache A is. The CacheA hooks up via ethernet, and EVERYONE in your facility on the network can see and mount the Cache-A, just like it’s a firewire drive (or NAS – it is a NAS, because it is a network drive).

I have to ASSUME that the BRU solution, or any direct attached solution would bog down the computer, or server as it is doing a backup, because there is no cache to act as a buffer. When you drag your files to the Cache-A, its literally going to a hard drive. The transfer to tape happens in the backtground (unattended – the editor does not see this happening, unless you look at the CACHE-A GUI). With a tape, its a real time transfer to the tape, which I have to assume is a LOT slower. so I ASSUME that if you have the BRU bundle solution, you should do your big backups AT NIGHT, or before you go home, so you are not bogging down the processing power of your MAC.

As with everything, there is always a tradeoff when you try to save money. This is no different when you see posts on these forums, when people expect a $75 internal SATA drive to perform like an external RAID 5 array with 16 drives in it.

bob Zelin

[Walter Soyka]

Thanks for your reply, Bob. I’ve learned a ton from you, going back to the Avid-L, and I sincerely appreciate all the time and knowledge you’ve shared.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Charles Wannop]

Sorry Bob, I should have mentioned that I am in Australia 🙂
My dollars don’t work as well as yours 🙁
The local distributor (great people who supplied my KiPro) show a discounted price of $11,257 for the Prime https://www.new-media.com.au/Cache-A-Prime-Cache-LTO-4-Archive-Appliance.html
I really don’t blame the locals (in THIS case) and I wouldn’t think of grey-marketing a device that I might need fast support on if something went wrong.

Charles

[Tom Goldberg]

Cache-A here… Thank you Bob for helping to spread the word about our products. I’d like to clear up a few minor points here.

How does it handle backups larger than included hard drive?

Users can archive directly to tape from network attached storage or from volumes plugged directly into our systems over USB, eSATA or FireWire (USB only on Prime). This allows a single action to archive a volume of any size spanning as many tapes as required. And, oh by the way, that 20-60GB session note in the manual is out of date – we now handle this automatically behind the scenes (as of v1.2.3 – Bob, please be sure you have this release).

What metadata is available in the searchable user-interface?

In addition to file, folder and tape names, we allow users to add 2 free-form text fields worth of virtually unlimited text to tag any file or folder and to be included in user searches. You can even add metadata to files in the catalog and it will be added back into that tape’s TOC (table of contents) when the system next sees it. These facilities will be enhanced further in future releases.

“according to Cache-A, the LTO4 tapes are completely compatible with other LTO 4 appliances”

Unfortunately this is not the case. To the best of my understanding, Bru, like Retrospect, BackupExec and most other back-up applications, write in a proprietary format that can not be read without the software used to write it.
Our tapes are written with the Unix/Linux standard tar format – this means that they can be read by any other system that support POSIX tar (which is any Linux/Unix computer or Macs/PCs with appropriate software installed). Further, we can only automatically read tapes written in another Cache-A system. It is possible to use a Cache-A to read a tar tape from non-Cache-A devices, but this requires a trip to terminal land. Please see our support page for tech briefs on this topic.

Charles, I’m sorry our costs are so high down under, but I can assure you that our distributor there, Intraware, can provide excellent support should you have any problems.

Tom Goldberg
Cache-A Corporation
30201 Rainbow Hill Road
Evergreen, CO 80439
mailto:tom.goldberg@cache-a.com
https://cache-a.com

[Bob Zelin]

well, I have a Cache-A complaint. How come Cache-A can’t put the current manual on the SUPPORT page as a .pdf ?

Bob Zelin