Why are tape compression capacities always double that of the native?

Question

Why are tape compression capacities always double that of the native?

Answer 1

It's just how tape drive marketing has shaped up over the years. The compression algorithms are shown at 2:1 compression (which is, frankly, a lot more than the 15 - 30% compression ratios that I usually see on real data).

I reckon from the native capacity, and anything more capacity that I can get is "bonus", unless I've got a very clear idea of the nature of the data. Given the possibility that you're going to run into pre-compressed data in a lot of environments (ZIP, JPG, AVI, MPG, MP3, etc) unless you're sure you've got uncompressed data to be backed-up I'd recommend not planning on anything more than the native capacity.

I describe the 2:1 compression world, to my Customers, as a "jolly, happy fantasy land where everyone stores only long runs of the letter 'A'".

Edit:

Don't forget that Office 2007 documents are already ZIP files (in disguise). If you're backing up a lot of those, don't assume you're going to get any compression.

Edit:

It's counter-intuitive, but you may find that you also get a speed increase on over-the-wire backups going with "Software compression" in your backup software, versus hardware compression. Backup Exec (at least version 11 and newer) does its "Software compression" at the remote host when performing an over-the-wire backup. If you're backing-up data that can be highly compressed you may be able to trade-off host CPU for network bandwidth and end up with a higher throughput. Obviously, this is one of the things that you need to "tune" and monitor, but generally speaking you should be monitoring your throughput anyway (since some tape drives show throughput degredation caused by read/write head damage or tape wear, both of which can be used as an ad hoc predictive indicator for failure).

Answer 2

Because it sounds more impressive than "somewhere between nothing and about (holds hands out) this much". Same reason hard drive manufacturers quote their drive sizes in millions of bytes -- marketing.

Less cynically, compression ratios are never fixed; they're always dependent on the data being compressed. Thus, if you want to quote any sort of "compressed capacity", you need to estimate. Presumably, based on an exhaustive survey of compression patterns in archived data (there's that cynicism again) one tape manufacturer or another worked out that a 2:1 ratio was somewhere in the right area, and just left it at that.

Personally, I would have been happier had they just stuck with "this is how many bits you can write to this tape", and left compression to someone else, but "monkey see, monkey do" applies to hardware manufacturers as much as four year olds, so once one manufacturer started writing "You can put 200MB (mumblecompressedmumble) on this tape!", they all had to follow suit...

Answer 3

The vendors are just assuming a compression ratio of 2:1, it's one of those things that should be a reasonable assumption and it looks better than just quoting the raw capacity but YMMV.

Answer 4

Not all tapes claim a 2:1 ratio. A Sony AIT-2 Turbo tape we have lying around claims 80BG/208GB.

According to the media info in Backup Exec we are currently getting between 1.9:1 and 2.1:1. While that may sound unusual, in my previous role we were getting between 1.8:1 and 2:1. That was in a completely different industry and therefore had a different file mix and using Arcserve. Clearly the claimed ration is achievable but it really does depend on what you're backing up. If you have a significant percentage of compressed files (e.g. ZIP, RAR, JPG, etc.) you may even lose capacity by having compression enabled, due to the overheads.

Answer 5

I think it's just that all the vendors agreed to just use 2:1 instead of trying to justify "our compression is 1.8:1 vs. 1.6:1 for the other guys." We use 1.5:1 when estimating how many tapes we need for something.