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Backblaze Is Wrong, Said Brad Johns Consulting

For calculation of cloud storage vs. LTO-8 cost

This article was written by by Brad Johns, president of Brad Johns Consulting LLC.

 

His firm provides analysis and consulting to help computer storage companies and end-users with their marketing  and strategy needs. He started a 32-year technology career with IBM in 1978 as a sales trainee for the data processing division. His career included management and project management positions in sales, consulting and marketing. The last fourteen years of his career were storage related and included storage marketing and product management responsibilities in Tucson, AZ. Storage offerings his worldwide team launched and marketed included enterprise disk, mid-range disk, NAS, SAN, storage virtualization, de-dupe, tape libraries and tape drives. He also managed market intelligence activities for storage offering and worked with customers to identify their storage needs. His previous experience included consulting as a member of IBM Innovation Consulting, which specialized in engineering change process analysis and workflow software implementations. His clients included major automotive and aerospace companies. In addition, he has a decade of information technology sales and sales management experience in the Los Angeles and Phoenix areas with Fortune 500 clients in the aerospace and manufacturing industries. 

Correcting the Backblaze Cloud Storage vs. LTO-8 Cost Calculator

As an independent storage industry analyst and consultant, I have worked with clients to develop storage TCO models and read with interest the LTO-8 versus Backblaze Storage Costs article and associated spreadsheet. I can appreciate the challenge that Backblaze confronted in attempting to estimate the TCO for backup over a range of years. Calculating a TCO for tape storage requires many assumptions and estimates, and they can dramatically impact the overall results.

The Backblaze TCO model’s estimate of tape TCO is based on an outdated view of tape backup applications. It utilizes the grandfather-father-son (GFS) tape backup model which modern backup applications have moved away from. Today’s modern backup applications take advantage of disk storage technology to store incremental backups as in disk to disk to tape. The use of a disk cache eliminates the need for incremental backup tape media and the associated handling costs which are included in the Backblaze calculator.

In addition, tape media has improved considerably since the 1990s with current formulations of tape having a life expectancy of 30 years or more. However, the Backblaze model assumes that all tapes are replaced at the end of each year. Eliminating the annual re-buy substantially reduces the cost of tape media as estimated by the Backblaze calculator.

Another challenging aspect of developing storage TCO is estimating operational labor costs. The Backblaze TCO model allocates 2.5 hours of labor per LTO-8 autoloader per week and scales this estimate linearly based on the number of tape autoloaders. However, it’s not unusual to see 20 or more tape drives in a single tape library which would require little more labor than an autoloader. The simple allocation of 2.5 hours per tape autoloader overestimates the labor costs associated with tape storage in larger environments.

Updating the Backblaze model for 50TB by removing incremental tapes, the annual tape media purchases and holding labor costs flat at 2.5 hours per week results in tape being less expensive than Backblaze over ten years:

  • $133,373 for tape vs. $148,387 for Backblaze
    However, with industry storage requirements growing, 50TB is no longer representative for many small and medium-sized organizations. If we assume the use of a single tape library and increase the amount of data being backed up to 200TB, tape storage becomes even more cost-effective;
  • $202,761 for tape vs. $342,787 for Backblaze
    In summary, the cost for the use of tape is consistently overestimated at almost any capacity by the Backblaze calculator. I can appreciate the difficulty in developing a storage TCO model. However, most organizations will find including tape storage in their backup environment to be a very cost-effective and reliable technology for their data protection.
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