The recent news that Tolis Group, the makers of the Bru and ArGest backup and archive products have ceased trading, is unfortunate for the vendor and their customers alike. Tolis Group customers will have data stored on tapes cartridges that require a working version of the software to restore from. Tolis made the latest versions of their products available to all, and stated on their website that there won't be issues accessing necessary software tools to perform restores of data on tape back to disk as required.
This situation creates some issues for their existing customers:
For how long will the existing versions of the Tolis products remain compatible with operating systems versions regularly in use?
How should Tolis customers continue to backup and archive data using BRU/ArGest, now that these products are no longer supported or updated?
How might a transition to a different system be handled?
In this article, we'll explore these topics in more detail, with particular reference to the Archiware P5 suite of products, which we feel have great relevance to these questions and offer excellent alternative solutions.
Taking stock
Let's begin by considering why one might have been using BRU/ArGest with tape storage in the first place, to get a better understanding why tape itself is desirable to use in various circumstances, since BRU/ArGest focussed on tape storage.
Customers likely had/have large quantities of data to secure (backup) and retain (archive). Such data often being large media files, e.g. graphics, audio, video.
Tape has a relatively cheap per TB cost, versus alternatives, but generally requires specialist software to utilise, hence Tolis products necessity for customers wishing to use it.
Tape is fast, around 300Mb/sec read/write speeds, allowing offloading of larger data-set relatively quickly.
Tapes are portable, more so than disks. Useful for off-site copies of data, or sending many TB's elsewhere.
Tapes are robust, the moving parts are all in the tape drive, not the cartridge. On a shelf, tapes last for decades, longer than hard drives.
The broad requirement is therefore providing an ability to backup and archive large quantities of data at low cost, at speed and with reliability. Tape ticks these boxes and fits the workflow.
The downsides to tape are the high up-front cost of purchasing the drives/library hardware required to use them. The hardware is quite mechanically complex and requires maintenance to keep it running, therefore purchase of maintenance contracts is generally sensible, so issues can quickly be resolved. Currently, LTO tape capacities are doubling every couple of years, meaning that what filled 10 tapes several years ago, may now fit on one. Therefore there's a tension felt with data on older tapes, because migrating it to newer tapes would be so much more efficient.
That said, LTO tape is still a very popular storage medium in certain vertical markets - those where large quantities of data are created quickly. Media & Entertainment, publishing, audio, science and many other generators of data at scale are LTO users.
Once potential candidate to consider that replaces tape for some backup and archive workflows is cloud storage. Various global vendors, including Microsoft, Amazon and Google, will sell scalable cloud storage that can be used for the same purposes as tape. All the downsides of tape can be traded against two simple factors required to use cloud storage: cost and speed.
Cloud storage is priced according to how much storage is used and for host long. For around $5-10 / month, one can store 1TB of data. Vendors vary in the details, but this data isn't stored on a single hard drive in the cloud. It will be stored on redundant storage within a data-center, and often with additional geographical redundancy across multiple data-centres. So the level of security is a level beyond what can be achieved by purchasing on-premise hardware.
The speed factor to consider is simple: how long will it take to archive a chunk of your data. Be that a movie shoot you did this week, or your existing tape archive being converted to a cloud archive. This factor is entirely dependent upon the speed of the internet connection between the office and the cloud vendor.
If these two factors, cost and speed, can be worked out, cloud storage for archive and backup is able to compete with on-site tape and should at least be considered.
Continuing with Tolis products
Nobody wants to be tied to old Operating system versions, but it's not uncommon to have to stick with an ageing version of an OS to keep some essential software-tool working. However, now that the Tolis products are frozen regarding updates, it makes sense to look at alternatives. It's great that there are easily accessible installers available for all of these products on the Tolis website.
One recommendation is to take the host currently running BRU/ArGest and commit to make no operating system updates which could potentially break a working solution and, in turn, access to a set of archive tapes.
Operating system updates often deal with security issues. Vulnerabilities are identified and holes closed to stop attacks, often coming remotely via the internet. Therefore consider disconnecting the BRU/ArGest system from the internet (often called an 'air-gap') to avoid such malicious attacks.
Finding an alternative product
For those wishing to find a drop-in replacement for BRU/ArGest, several products exist, at varying levels of cost and complexity. In this article we will concentrate on Archiware P5, the product that JPY represents. P5 is well known for providing a lot of flexibility and power for its price point.
P5 is a suite of products that replace all of the Tolis functionality and are heavily used within the Media & Entertainment spheres where BRU/ArGest were also popular.
The suite comprises these 4 modules:
P5 Archive - Indexed-based archive to tape/disk/cloud. Browsable/searchable index, including thumbnails and meta-data from original files. Full single drive and library support. Compression, encryption, tape spanning and cloning. Handles multiple LTO drives simultaneously. LTFS support.
P5 Backup - Index referenced backup for DR purposes to tape/disk/cloud.
P5 Synchronize - File/folder replication between hosts on a schedule.
P5 Backup2Go - Workstation/endpoint backup, to disk.
All four modules are configured/monitored via a consistent web-admin interface using any web browser. Runs on Windows, Linux, macOS, FreeBSD. Installers for Synology, QNAP and NetGear ReadyNAS devices. Deployable in Amazon Web Services.
P5 has very flexible and broad support for LTO devices and libraries. As such any LTO hardware in use on a BRU/ArGest installation will work with P5 Archive and Backup.
Transitioning
Let's first consider LTFS. This is a portable format for writing data onto LTO tapes, supported by some versions of BRU/ArGest. Archiware P5 Archive is able to read the index from an LTFS tape and dump the contents of the tape back to disk. This is via a simple import/export feature within P5 designed for this purpose.
Those with existing non-LTFS BRU/ArGest written tapes, will require a working copy of this software to restore data back to disk. Tolis software writes tapes in a proprietary format, and is required to read them. Therefore a large archive would all need to be restored back to disk storage before it can be re-archived using an alternative product, such as P5 Archive.
This process will take some time and enough storage to accommodate restored data, before it can be archived again and deleted. This process can be completed in chunks, limited by the amount of disk storage to accommodate.
Transitioning the archive software is an ideal opportunity to update the LTO generation to a more recent one, resulting in many fewer tapes being required to store the same amount of data.
P5 is able to extract both thumbnails/proxies of media files being archived and meta-data. This additional data is stored with the index, resulting in a very rich 'media asset management' type experience when browsing searching for data that needs to be restored.
Transitioning a backup, for disaster recovery purposes, to a different software product is much easier than is the case for archive workflows. This is because there’s not generally a necessity to transfer data already backed up into the new product. One can simply take a ‘full’ backup of all data with the new software product and then continue with the usual sequence of incremental or full backups from that point forward. This will populate the new product with useful backups from which restores can be made when needed. Once the ‘window’ of available backups in the new product as of a comfortable size, the old product can be decommissioned without any expected restore requirement being needed in the future.
Concluding
Backup and archiving of valuable data for the longer term always relies on both hardware and software being available and working for the long term. As we’ve explored in this article, this can be tricky, especially when there’s a reliance on proprietary products and storage formats.
Consider using the more portable and less proprietary LTFS format. Not entirely free of vendor lock-in since the LTO consortium comprises only a small number of vendors steering the future of the technology, but better than a single vendor.
The Archiware P5 product suite is a great fit for customer looking to backup and archive to LTO, with broad support for all the existing LTO hardware configurations. It’s functionality is broader than that of many competitors, and the inclusion of cloud storage support might be an addition that attractive to many.
