220TB Tapes Show Tape Storage Still Has a Long Future 229
alphadogg writes: IBM and Fujifilm have figured out how to fit 220TB of data on a standard-size tape that fits in your hand, flexing the technology's strengths as a long-term storage medium. The prototype Fujifilm tape and accompanying drive technology from IBM labs packs 88 times as much data onto a tape as industry-standard LTO-6 systems using the same size cartridge, IBM says. LTO6 tape can hold 2.5TB, uncompressed, on a cartridge about 4 by 4 inches across and 2 centimeters thick. The new technologies won't come out in products for several years.
LHC Too (Score:5, Interesting)
They use tapes to store all that data they get from smashing tiny bits together. Totally forget how much one of their tapes hold, but at the time I remember thinking it was a lot.
Re:LHC Too (Score:5, Funny)
LHCs tape archive is stored in the closet next to the superconducting magnet.
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In superconducting closet?
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From http://cerncourier.com/cws/art... [cerncourier.com]
The current candidates for the tape drives that will record LHC experimental data are the enterprise-class drives from IBM and Sun StorageTek. These are the IBM 3592 EO5, which has a native data rate of 100 MB/s; and the Sun StorageTek T10000, which has a native data rate of 120 MB/s. Both of these drives use a 500 GB capacity cartridge.
The interesting thing is that the LHC can generate up to 6GB of data per second, which means that even a 500GB tape will only last for 83 seconds. It's good that they've got all of those robots handling these tapes.
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Is that before or after first sorting?
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People that quote the data rate/sec ignore that the data generated is only generated for a few seconds at the most, the bulk of the data is in the first few milliseconds after the collision. It simply doesn't take long for the remains of the destroyed protons to disintegrate within the bubble chamber.
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They have 1PB worth of disk cache in front of their tape storage... so yeah, quite a bit of PB. Tape isn't dead, but it's not worth it for small quantities (100TB) and many companies don't even have 100TB worth of centralized storage. Most companies can get away with storing stuff on the 'cloud' which is very expensive per GB/TB compared to either local or colocated disk storage or tape.
Re:Trade off tape vs HD (Score:2)
> Tape isn't dead, but it's not worth it for small quantities
The cheapest LTO-6 drive on NewEgg is $1500, and Sony has the tapes for $18/TB. External hard drives are running about $35/TB. So you need ~90 TB for cost crossover on sheer data volume, not considering usability and reliability. So I would agree, with those kind of prices, you might want to *start* thinking about tape when you get to 100 TB, because 1 drive isn't very reliable. It might work for backup storage, since you can get by with a
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> Tape isn't dead, but it's not worth it for small quantities
The cheapest LTO-6 drive on NewEgg is $1500, and Sony has the tapes for $18/TB. External hard drives are running about $35/TB. So you need ~90 TB for cost crossover on sheer data volume, not considering usability and reliability.
People who quote that hard drives are cheaper than tape always leave out the cost of electricity and reliability. If I'm going to tape, that is one of the reasons whether it's backup or archiving. I can take that tape out and store it w/o power for years and reliably read it back.
How long can you reliably do that with a hard drive? The mfg don't design drives for that, they design for always powered up drives. If I need that, I probably need to test for it and that can change with models and firmware se
Never consumer ready (Score:4, Interesting)
Wake me when tape is reliable AND costs 10% of the $/GB of hard drive storage.
Worthwhile for enterprise... maybe. I haven't even looked at a tape backup in decades, but I do not relish paying more for a single tape than an entire 2TB HDD... as a consumer, or even as an enthusiast. It's cheaper and possibly more reliable to do backups to BD-R at this point, or simply use redundant HDDs as backup devices.
Re:Never consumer ready (Score:5, Insightful)
Tape backups have been an enterprise only product for years. And they are backing up enterprise (server-grade) hard drives that cost substantially more than consumer SATA drives.
Re:Never consumer ready (Score:5, Interesting)
Even enterprises are using a lot of SATA drives now. The super-fast-and-reliable niche that used to belong to enterprise drives has gone to flash. It's usually cheaper to use consumer drives and some better software to manage the inevitable failure than to use enterprise drives.
Re:Never consumer ready (Score:5, Interesting)
It's usually cheaper to use consumer drives and some better software to manage the inevitable failure than to use enterprise drives.
There is NO difference in reliability between "consumer" and "enterprise" drives. The only reason to buy enterprise drives is because you have excess money that you are too stupid to keep. All the big storage companies use consumer grade drives, and several of them, including Google and Backblaze, have published data that clearly show there is no reliability or performance reason to buy "enterprise" drives. They are a scam.
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RED drives are specifically designed for RAID enclosures to prevent early failure due to vibration and constant sleep/wake cycles. They even avoid synchronizing their vibrations with other disks in the array.
Sure in some situations you can get by with regular consumer gear, but in other situations it's asking for trouble.
Re:Never consumer ready (Score:5, Insightful)
RED drives are specifically designed for RAID enclosures to prevent early failure due to vibration and constant sleep/wake cycles.
Baloney. If this were true, it would show up in reliability data. It does not.
Sure in some situations you can get by with regular consumer gear, but in other situations it's asking for trouble.
Thanks for the advice. But I prefer to listen to people that know what they are talking about, and have data to back it up.
Btw, I have some super premium gold plated SATA cables that will DOUBLE the reliability of your enterprise drives!!! Please post your credit card number and address.
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Market segmentation and price discrimination.
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having worked for a storage vendor for many years, i have data that says you're wrong.
in the early days, we allowed customers to buy their own drives. many of them got
consumer drives and suffered for it. one customer bought 16 consumer grade drives
from either wd or segate (i forget), and every one failed within two years.
in my own personal array, i caught samsung 750gb drives lying to me about having
written data after a power outage. (reading returned all 0s after having flushed the
cache.)
as we got more
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having worked for a storage vendor for many years, i have data that says you're wrong.
Golly, who should I believe? Numerous companies that have published actual data on hundreds of thousands of drives, or some random anonymous guy on the Internet with an anecdote. Decisions, decisions ....
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By that measure, how credible are you exactly?
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if one of my HP drives fails i call it in and get a new one in less than 24 hours with a pre-paid label to ship the old one back. consumer drives you won't get an answer for days
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If one of your consumer drives fail, you've got a new one in seconds without any physical activity, because the massive cost savings allows you to keep lots of spare drives on-site as hot or cold spares. Any company that has zero spare drives and must wait for an RMA to get their RAID array back in operation is doing it wrong.
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The high RPM SAS drive business is just kept running to supply a few left over suckers ...
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It doesn't matter. If you are waiting for a storage vendor to send you replacement gear then you're irresponsible and putting your company at unecessary risk. Even a good SLA that's actually successfully executed is still too much exposure.
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if one of my HP drives fails i call it in and get a new one in less than 24 hours with a pre-paid label to ship the old one back.
So you pay $300 for a $100 drive because there is a 10% chance you will get another $100 drive? You are either really bad at math, or you are spending someone else's money.
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The cost of the drive is not the hardware.
It is how much will an outage cost? A few hundred more is pocket change. A piece of mind too. You claim you hqve data? I have data too. Go google Seagate RMA? Shitty defective drives. Even western digital has bad drive batches. The poster above says seagate and consumer drives failed within his own eyes. Sure if you got a good batch you are good I guess?? Would you bet your job on it?
Firmware for enterprise drives have logging and more advanced features anyway. Same
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Why have an outage?
With the cost difference you replace one RAID-5 array with a RAID-61 array with 8 hot spares.
RAID is not backup (Score:2)
The most "enterprisy" array can still be toast due to an electrical event, deliberate corruption, accidental corruption, fire or theft. That's when you want the option to restore to new hardware from tape.
Also if you have many TB of data that you never want to lose but nobody is likely to look at this year.
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If one of our nodes goes offline for 3 days due to a failed drive
So, the phrase "hot spare" is new to you, then. That speaks . . . volumes.
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You do realize that for either of those two use cases they are not in typical enterprise settings. No hardware raid controllers (or at least being used a jbod) means no need for TER. They are not buying anybody solution the tech is a core business function. You average enterprise cares about somebody to call to fix it more than we saved 50% on hardware.
For my own company you better beleive we use consumer grade drives internally. Things like ZFS mean all the hot data is on SSD anyways (and while you can
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Remember that the directional arrow needs to point towards the storage controller for most applications. You only point it towards the drive for a predominantly write-only application, like a backup store.
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Enterprises still use lots of tape backups. It's still much cheaper and more durable when it comes to backup up servers and physically shipping the data to IronMountain or the like. Iron Mountain's advertising trumpets that 94% of Fortune 1000 companies use their service, so that's a pretty clear indication that tape is alive and well.
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I haven't been in a server room in an embarrassingly long time, but I understood enterprise drives to mean hot pluggable with online redundancy. For a not large business, knowing a drive failure would result in no downtime and never having to roll back to tape was worth virtually any premium. In this scenario, tape only came into play when wanting to retrieve deleted data.
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Used to, years ago. But not since the transition to SATA. All SATA drives are hot-pluggable, though most consumer controllers don't support it easily. In a modern system, the drives are basically dumb stores: All the intelligence is in the controller or software.
The difference between regular drives and 'enterprise' drives is a lot less than it used to be. Enterprise drives have a higher claimed MTBF, a better warranty cover (So you'll believe the MTBF) and usually come in smaller capacities (The cost of re
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If you don't need to store tremendous amounts of data or to keep this data in more than a dozen different places, spinning hard drives will do just fine.
If you need to store petabytes of data in redundant locations, tape robots are your friend. ;-)
Re:Never consumer ready (Score:5, Insightful)
As far as I can recall, tape backup systems have never been a consumer product. At least, I don't recall tape systems ever being marketed that way.
I think the big difference nowadays though, is that tape backup used to be the only real viable option for small business' computers and servers. Nowadays, it seems like cloud-based backups like Amazon Glacier are a much more sensible for smaller systems.
BTW, redundant HDDs as a backup system is a really bad idea unless you:
a) take them offline, and
b) store them offsite.
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As far as I can recall, tape backup systems have never been a consumer product.
You never used an audio cassette tape to backup your TRS-80?
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why would you name your backup service after something associated with being very slow?
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It IS slow, intentionally so, at least for retrieval of your data. That's fine for a backup system - and Glacier is specifically marketed for this. You want reliability and economy for backups, not speed. They've reduced the cost of the storage by sacrificing retrieval speed. "Glacier" is also evocative of "cold storage"
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Because it's marketed as being very slow, with response times measured in hours? It's a very cheap offline storage solution that uses BD-R discs and robots.
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As far as I can recall, tape backup systems have never been a consumer product. At least, I don't recall tape systems ever being marketed that way.
Sure they were, but perhaps not in this millennium. The last tape drive I bought was in 1995 or 1996, and it was definitely advertised in a run-of-the-mill computer magazine or consumer product guide, which would also advertise games and such. Back when floppy disks were your only other reasonable option for backup, tape drives were a reasonable consumer option for home users with more than a few dozen worth of floppies of data to store.
But then zip disks became a thing for a while, and by the late 90s,
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As far as I can recall, tape backup systems have never been a consumer product. At least, I don't recall tape systems ever being marketed that way
QIC, Travan, Iomega Ditto, and DDS (DAT) tape drives were all marketed as consumer products in the 1990's.
In 2000 a DDS-2 tape cost $4.47, with a capacity of 8 GB (compressed): 56 cents per gigabyte. A 9.1 GB SCSI hard drive cost $385: $4.23 per gigabyte. Reusable optical media was not cost effective, and there wasn't anything else (that I can remember) with both high capacity and low cost.
(QIC and Travan drives were cheap, but the tapes were expensive; around $30 per tape IIRC. DDS tapes were cheap,
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DDS drives were somewhat expensive, but nothing like the cost of LTO today. Using your figures, the break even on cost was 2 tapes worth of data and that amount of data was well withing the amount a 'power user' might want to safely store.
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I have never lost data due to a DDS tape failure.
LTO is more durable to be sure, but it's also priced out of the consumer market and mostly out of the small business market.
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So yes, anecdote not statistic, whether DDS was crap or not in general it ce
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QIC 80 was very much marketed to consumers and the tapes held more data than a typical HD of the day. They were quite common on high end PCs.
Now get off my lawn!
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As far as I can recall, tape backup systems have never been a consumer product. At least, I don't recall tape systems ever being marketed that way.
You must be young. Back in the 90s, we had "floppy tapes": QIC systems connected to the floppy connector on the motherboard, and with the correct software let you store 20MB or 40MB per tape (more with compression turned on). These were marketed to small businesses and high-end consumers. One of these tape drives didn't cost any more than a typical hard drive
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Holy crap, I give! I give!
Ok, obviously there were some tape drives offered on consumer models. I'd imagine that the *vast* majority of consumer PCs didn't have tape drive hardware on them, but yes, they certainly were available.
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Never consumer ready
Never really meant to be.
Wake me when tape is reliable AND costs 10% of the $/GB of hard drive storage.
Yeah? Well, wake me up when they cost five precent of the $/GB of HDDs!
Arbitrary criteria FTW!
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Not at all arbitrary. DDS2 tapes and drive came in at about 10% the cost of drives.
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Wake me when tape is reliable AND costs 10% of the $/GB of hard drive storage.
No, you have to get up before that so you can shlep 22 10 TB hard drives to the backup site.
The truth is that there is no simple solution for backup -- not if you consider preparing for future contingencies. Backup to hard drives? Your backup data is an asset that needs constant maintenance less bit-rot set in.
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They are actually cheaper per TB if you need to consume at least a 4U tape robot worth of tape (20-30k, several PB). Otherwise disk storage is the way to go. Most enterprises don't need tape though, they have it grandfathered in from 'mainframe' systems and 90's Sun systems and a 'we don't know any better' mentality.
The consumer will never be ready (Score:2)
Tapes have never gone out of use for large databases. The tape storage is cheap per bit compared to other formats. We know the life of a bit on tape is finite, and we know the random access time of tape is horrible. However, suppose you are providing a reliable backup service. You will have at least three copies of every record at any time, with probably a fourth archive kept separate for legal reasons. Ideally, the three copies will be in different geographical and economic zones, so you can survive the t
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While it's stupid to not format shift tape from the 1970s a few times between then and now, and while it's stupid to store it in a cardboard box in hot and humid environment for 40 years I've still been lucky with about twenty reels of tape like that.
The usual mode of failure seems to be people cleaning out storerooms. Hence me those tapes I mentioned above that were only made to transport data fro
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For consumer yes, but who is talking about consumers anywhere in the article?
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I had some reels of tape from the 1970s transcibed last year and it worked with zero problems. I've had others done previously, same result.
How arbitrary. Tape is for offline storage and hard drives have known problems with spinning up after a few years idle.
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How long in archive do you think that consumer grade USB drive will last?
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Unless you buy them in massive bulk, like Amazon did, and then they become cheaper than all other alternatives. And swapping isn't a problem when you're massively automated.
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Depends on what type of disc you're using. A 5TB drive would require as few as ~39 discs.
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Amazon buys them by the truckload and ends up paying a tiny fraction of that. It turns out that when you order BDXL discs in bulk quantities, the costs go way down.
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Not only that: HDDs spindles seeze up after a while if not spinning from what I've heard (lubricant drying out in the barings?). Tape: designed to sit idle for 99.99% of their life.
The cost of the tape drive is the killer. You need to have enough data that you can amortize the cost over many tapes, but given the fairly limited drive slots available on very expensive disk arrays + the cost of the FC ports on the network switches etc etc life becomes much easier quickly having a robot and 4 tape drives attach
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external drive: permanently attached. It is where my "acquired" media lives. Store shelf: it is a matter of magnitude. Likely HDD at store is turned over at least once a year. Typical retail you need to turn your inventory over 3-4 times a year at least. But long term archival storage for enterprise: 10yr +. With that long of a duration you need something like LTO that really, really tries for backwards compatibility. Try to get an IDE (or earlier) connection on your new server.
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Not with a $30 dock it isn't.
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But the price for a single tape drive is beyond insane.
That's pretty easy; it's because of the volume it's sold in. All your consumer electronic gear would cost similar amounts if it sold in similar quantities. There's 1-3 orders of magnitude fewer tape drives sold than, say, laptop optical drives, so of course it's going to cost a lot more.
You might not remember this, but all this consumer computing gear used to cost a fortune too. I remember paying around $600-700 for a 14" monitor once, and $350 for
Imperial measurements (Score:2)
And much like tape, it seems like the random mixing of imperial and metric measurements won't ever go away, either :)
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And much like tape, it seems like the random mixing of imperial and metric measurements won't ever go away, either :)
When I was in the military, we always measured distance along the ground in kilometers (or "clicks" in mil-lingo), but altitude was always in feet (or "angels" = 1000 feet). So at least we were metric for 2/3rds of the dimensions. With this tape, only one dimension is metric, so we are going backwards.
Re: Imperial measurements (Score:3)
Here in Saskatchewan, Canada, we measure distance in time.
For example:
Person 1: "How far is Calgary from Regina?"
Person 2: "Oh about 7 hours."
I'm not sure why we do this, but this is the honest truth. My wife used to work at a service station, and had people ask how far X was. They would look at her like she was an alien if they weren't from around here.
The article used primary metric measurements (Score:3)
Actually, the article gave all metric primary measurements, and English in parentheses for enough of them for the metric-impaired to understand the scale.
"...about 10 by 10 centimeters (4 by 4 inches) across and 2 centimeters thick"
So apparently, it was the OP who took the queue from NASA [nasa.gov].
cheap? (Score:2)
Sure, the tapes themselves may be cheap. But the drives are quite expensive.
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As for keeping H/Ss powered down - a good percentage will never spin up again, or mysteriously lose their servo tracks or something. How long have we had SATA? How much longer will we have it?
Tapes can be read after 30 years (I know, I have done this myself). Over 30 years, the drive technology may change a bit, so you probably need to keep your old drives, and SCSI is more than 30 years old. One drive will write a lot of tapes. Perhaps a few thousand b
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As for keeping H/Ss powered down - a good percentage will never spin up again, or mysteriously lose their servo tracks or something. How long have we had SATA? How much longer will we have it?
Tapes can be read after 30 years (I know, I have done this myself). Over 30 years, the drive technology may change a bit, so you probably need to keep your old drives, and SCSI is more than 30 years old.
Did you know that you can attach SATA drives to SAS controllers? If you think SCSI is going to be around for the long haul, then you think SATA is as well since they are compatible in that direction.
Older tapes might be readable after 30 years, but what about modern ones? They say they will, but we won't know for sure until about 2045. If you really care about archiving data, you need to use more than one medium.
Archival BluRay is a pretty good format. Not as high capacity as tape but cheap and the drives w
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If you were the compliance officer, where would you put the transactional data from your bank?
On a WORM tape [wikipedia.org], that's the only right answer to this particular question.
If your data is worth keeping. LTO is the way to go. Three copies, on 3 different tapes, in each of three different states.
For ordinary backup of systems I'd consider just having enough copies on HDDs, because it tends to be fairly obvious when they fail. If the system is reasonably intelligent I should be able to plug in any drive and it'll seamlessly add it to the backup cloud downloading what it needs from other nodes, I'm not sure it's the most cost effective way but it's not really the price/TB that drives backup costs, often it's a total disaster to
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On a WORM tape, that's the only right answer to this particular question.
Not true. As compliance officer, you job is not to store data such that it can be recovered later, your job is to store data such that you pass auditing requirements, and actually being able to restore the data is a negative. This is why WORM disk sells well at 100x the cost of normal drives (really) - passes all the auditing requirements, much more likely to fail mysteriously.
But I'd seriously go with something cloud-based for this. Does Iron Mountain still have their service? Or did that get spun off
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This is like saying "sure the SATA drives are cheap, but a RAID boxes are quite expensive"
No one buys a tape drive or library for work with just one tape.
Capacity isn't the problem. (Score:5, Interesting)
"...The new technologies won't come out in products for several years."
Er, several years?
For a minute there, I thought they were referring to the restore time for a full cartridge.
Capacity isn't really the problem with tape media. It's sitting around waiting for ages if you ever have to actually execute a full restore of that much data from tape.
Not quite sure why it remains a viable solution for that reason alone, especially in this era of the InstaTwitterVine level of instant gratification. Spinning rust in the cloud might be a bit more volatile, but it will likely always be a hell of a lot faster.
Re:Capacity isn't the problem. (Score:4, Insightful)
These guys http://hardware.slashdot.org/s... [slashdot.org] probably would have preferred to be able to come back up after some number of days, rather than ever. That said, not all losses of data are total, so it might make sense to have a tape system for catastrophes and some other system for correcting a smaller mistake.
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Modern tape drives can be really fast, with transfer rates of above 100MB/s. The real bottleneck when restoring large amounts of data is often not the tape drive speed but the write performance of the storage array, specially if you're restoring lots of small files, or the networking, etc. Anyone who has moved things like user home directories between machines knows that. Remember than when you're backing up many machines, you don't always have the luxury of having the tape drive connected to each machine
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You can also ship tape a lot easier than a hard drive. No need for shock sensors. Latency may be bad but a box of tapes can give you more bandwidth/s than even the fastest Internet connection.
"Long future"? (Score:3)
Tape media lasts as long as all other media ... (Score:2)
... as long as you need it to minus one second.
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We're talking about back ups, not making archives. The reliability doesn't seem that relevant for backup purposes. A typical organization probably wouldn't want to keep backups older than say a year.
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High Density Punch Cards (Score:3)
Queue the Parochial Comments (Score:4, Insightful)
"I don't understand why anyone would use tape. After all I've never used it/not for years/etc."
If you feel the urge to say words like this, just stop after the first 3 words. You don't understand. That's enough right there.
Some people have volumes of data that you cannot fathom. Some organizations have use cases that you haven't encountered. Maybe even some organizations make decisions that' could be handled another way, and maybe that different way might be better too. But's that's speculative based upon NO information.
The continuing demand for tape pretty well speaks for itself though.
WORN (Score:5, Funny)
Write Once Read Never
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Back in the early 80's I had a job working at night watching the network of the then-new ATMs, and restarting them when they crashed (often). It was a time-sharing place with big mainframes and giant spools of tape. The write speed on those was horrible, partly because first you had to wake up the invariably dozing tape hanger, who would then stumble over, find the proper tape, and put it on the spool.
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IRS (Score:2)
Someone should send a shitload of these to the IRS.
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Existing tape technology (LTO 6 and newer) is no slouch. I can saturate an 8 GB FC link with an eight drive silo and Solaris or AIX driving it (with TSM or Networker as a backup infrastructure.)
Lifespan (Score:3)
Properly stored tape has a lifetime of decades. See if your hard drive will spin up after sitting for one decade.
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yea and I have one from 1992 spin up and instantly toss a bearing in the actuator arm, they are fidgety metal mechanical objects, your mileage may vary
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takes about a minute or two for LTO-4 tape
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People who use tape, often have a lot more to backup that what fits on a 3TB USB drive. They probably use tape libraries connected to a storage area network, with tapes shipped to an off-site storage location.