back to article Hey small biz: You know what you need? A tape library – Overland

Overland has got itself a new NEO tape library (cue jokes about the Matrix Reloaded) called the NEOxl, and it's packed a huge amount of capacity inside it. The two models in the product line both support LTO5 and LTO6 tape formats and come in 6U enclosures: NEOxl 60 To 3 drives and 60 slots 90TB-375TB capacity (90TB is …

  1. Mike S

    still really cheap

    I bought a few overland products a few years back. They were cheap, had a ton of capacity for the price, worked 95% of the time (which really isn't great) and were cheap. Also they were cheap.

    Kind of warms my heart to see that they're out there still making cheap stuff with tons of capacity. Not thrilled to see them move to China but quality wasn't why you bought them anyway.

  2. Lee D Silver badge

    "Small" business messing about with 60 LTO tapes? It's hard to imagine.

    And I was of the opinion that tape is pretty much dead. I'm sure the end-run of backups is a tape in a safe somewhere, but 60 tapes in an active device, presumably cycled and moved off-site or into secure storage? Doesn't seem worth the effort.

    The last time I had to RESTORE from tape (i.e. where all other methods have failed, and not for test purposes) was... god knows. Back in the 90's. Keep some spinning rust going, it's cheaper than a handful of tapes, provides much quicker restore even if it's not a guaranteed backup solution on it's own, and grabbing one file off it takes seconds. And it doesn't really care if you keep it in a slightly damp/cold room.

    Seriously, what class of small business has a guy cycling 60+ tapes throughout the week as just their last-ditch backup, not counting all the other IT management?

    1. seven of five

      Quite a few small businesses run "easy" backup solution, doing a full GFS rotation for every server they have.

      6 per week, 5 per month and another 13 for the year times three servers and all your tapes are used up. Or rather allocated.

      And being able to take something in your hand and say "that´s the filemailserver from the 66th of maycember" gives the poor slob which does "that computer stuff" some confidence.

      Yes, that is rather inefficient, but a single drive from an array is more difficult to bring offsite. and its not all eggs in one basket (array) as well.

      I can see the point.

      1. James 100

        Yep - I took over support for a small business which had a backup system consisting of an external USB HDD with nightly full Windows NT Backup backups going back a week. That was it:7 big files. Of course, as soon as the server filled up beyond 1/7th of that drive's capacity, the backups stopped working...

        (Almost no budget for new anything, so I switched it to a weekly full backup and nightly incrementals to keep it going, then backed it up over the Net to a server of my own just in case.)

        Of course, a library of 60 tapes would be massive overkill as an upgrade from "one external USB drive", but there's definitely still a place for tape!

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