How to project or forecast how many tapes we will require in an year?

[tyadagiri]

Hi,

Would like to know if there is any standard procedure to calculate the tapes required in a year?

Any formula?

[Genericus]

Base it on the estimated data, and the number of drives and how often you remove tapes (vault) - also, you have to factor in retention, say you have a 30 day retention, you will reuse those tapes so 30 days x daily value. what if you have once a month long term? 12 x daily value. What if you have some one off longer retention? like 7yr or infinite?

simplest is just data divided by data per tape. However - wildly inaccurate.  You should track how many tapes you use daily and guestimate from that.

I can tell you how many tapes I sent off site for any day back to 2011, I put it in a spreadsheet.

I use 18 LTO5, which is 1.5TB uncompressed, 3TB compressed. But I ALWAYS have 18 partially full tapes!

12/09 I used 46 tapes to store 90TB - 90/3 should have been 30 tapes

12/10 I used 46 tapes to store 131TB - 131/3 should have been 44 tapes

You have to take into account partially full tapes. Optimally you will get the rated TB per tape, if you use the uncompressed value you will over estimate but you won't run out.

[franciscotorres]

Try this

http://eval.symantec.com/flashdemos/products/backup_exec/dedupe_calculator/index.html

http://eval.symantec.com/flashdemos/products/netbackup_puredisk/calculator/

http://eval.symantec.com/flashdemos/products/netbackup/dedupe_calc/

[Marianne]

@franciscotorres 

How will DEDUPE calculators help with TAPE usage forecast? 

[mph999]

.. it's the new de-dup to tape feature , come on Marianne, keep up ....

;0)

(I better add that I am joking in case someone sees this and takes me seriously ....)

[Marianne]

---

@mph999 wrote:

.. it's the new de-dup to tape feature , come on Marianne, keep up ....

---

[Mouse]

---

@mph999 wrote:

.. it's the new de-dup to tape feature , come on Marianne, keep up ....

;0)

(I better add that I am joking in case someone sees this and takes me seriously ....)

---

I would laugh if it wouldn't be so sad, some of CommVault customers indeed do dedupe to tape (CV supports it so who knows if somebody decide it's a nice tickbox for RFPs)...

[Marianne]

Sadly Veritas believes that tape is dead with seemingly no new development in that are.

Looking at VOX posts, we KNOW that tape is far from dead.... 

[franciscotorres]

Marianne just put the 3 links as useful data, sarcasm is not necessary, I only intend to contribute.