After 60 Years, Tape Reinserts Itself

Lucas123 writes "While magnetic tape is about as boring as technology gets, it's still the cheapest storage medium and among the fastest in sequential reads and writes. And, with the release of LTO-6 with 8TB cartridges around the corner and the relatively new open linear tape file system (LTFS) being embraced by movie and television markets, tape is taking on a new life. It may even climb out of the dusty archives that cheap disk has relegated it to. 'Over the last two years, disk drives have gotten bigger, they've gone from 1TB to 3TB, but they haven't gotten faster. They're more like tape. Meanwhile, tape is going the other direction, it's getting faster,' said Mark Lemmons, CTO of Thought Equity Motion, a cloud storage service for the motion picture industry."

Comments

Sci-Fi is Reel again

[Ukab the Great]

Once again, Reel-To-Reel computers are no longer anachronistic in 60's Sci-Fi shows.

Re:Sci-Fi is Reel again

[AliasMarlowe]

Once again, Reel-To-Reel computers are no longer anachronistic in 60's Sci-Fi shows.

But... but... they must have the blinkenlights!

Re:Sci-Fi is Reel again

[lightknight]

And blow up with explosions, even if there is nothing remotely explosive stored around or within them.

Re:Sci-Fi is Reel again

[Hoi Polloi]

And the tar command will actually refer to tapes again

Re:Sci-Fi is Reel again

[donaldm]

Just make your magnetic tape on a nitrocellulose base.

I was working for a Government scientific company back in the 1980's and was asked to purchase a years worth of backup tapes so I was pointed to a Government preferred company to purchase the reel to reel tapes (max capacity 100MB - not bad for the day). For a year the tapes worked flawlessly then the substrate started to flake off rendering the tapes useless. It seams either someone got a kick back or the people who make the recommendations for preferred Government purchases really stuffed up. Needless to say when we found out we had to repurchase tapes. Fortunately we were never asked to recover data from those tapes so it was not that serious, however it could have been.

Re:Sci-Fi is Reel again

[neyla]

What's the lifespan of tape, if you keep it online and randomly seeking and searching 24x7x365 ?

HDDs that are operated like tapes; "connect - dump data onto them - disconnect and store, repeat monthly" on the average have excellent lifetimes. I've done that for the last decade, with around 100 HDDs, and only twice has a drive died on me. Much more often, I've retired old HDDs because it's just not worth it to use a 150GB HDD when one with ten times the capacity cost $100.

Offcourse random crashes will happen, but that is true of tape too. That's why you never have only *one* backup.

Re:Sci-Fi is Reel again

[mcgrew]

I had a friend in the lats 1990s who, when he saw I had a computer, acrually asked "aren't you afraid it will explode?" See what happens when you can't tell fiction from reality?

The reason that the old movie and TV shows (especially in the fifties) depicted computers blowing up was because the early computers used vaccuum tubes, which need a lot of power to heat all the filiments in all the tubes; these things had an insane number of tubes compared to any other piece of electronics.

If there's a short circuit anywhere inside one of these antique tube monstrosities, it did in fact often go off with a loud pop and a bright flash. Short a 110v power plug and you'll see what I mean. Today's computers, being solid state, don't use more than 12v outside the power supply itself.

That's not to say that some of those old shows weren't laughably ignorant. One episode of The Prisoner had number six making a computer blow up by asking it "why?"

Reinserts itself

[techstar25]

Sure, it reinserts itself, but when it's finished does it take itself out, flip it to the other side, and then reinsert itself again?

Re:Reinserts itself

[emurphy42]

Only if you get the Mobius tape, which costs extra.

Re:Reinserts itself

[rvw]

Sure, it reinserts itself, but when it's finished does it take itself out, flip it to the other side, and then reinsert itself again?

Like the Nakamichi tapedecks from the 80s?

Re:Reinserts itself

[c0lo]

Sure, it reinserts itself, but when it's finished does it take itself out, flip it to the other side, and then reinsert itself again?

:P TFS suggests so:

Meanwhile, tape is going the other direction

Re:Reinserts itself

[hawk]

It do sn't; it ju t has many an oying g ps in it.

ha k

Finally!!

[iamhassi]

I've missed my tape drive! My TR-3 1.6/3.2 circa 1996, was plenty for the hard drives available at time and pretty much a requirement for Windows 95 considering how often it killed itself, but within just a few years the hard drives far exceeded the capacity of tape. Fortunately by then Windows 2000 was out and life has been good since.

I'd love to use tape again, but with 1.5/3.0TB drives selling in the $1,500 range it still doesn't make sense, not when I can buy a dozen 2TB hard drives for the price of one 1.5/3.0TB tape drive

Re:Finally!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd love to use tape again, but with 1.5/3.0TB drives selling in the $1,500 range it still doesn't make sense, not when I can buy a dozen 2TB hard drives for the price of one 1.5/3.0TB tape drive

Right, and if all you need is a few dozen drives, it's probably not worth it. Let's talk when you need to backup 12 TB every night and you can only recycle the tapes yearly. Two drives and 1800 tapes is cheaper than 1800 drives, and until convinced otherwise I believe the tapes will take the time in storage with a better chance of coming back to life.

Tape isn't for days of storage, it's for archival.

Re:Finally!!

[gnick]

And... how many people, need that? To store 12 TB nightly? Few thousand businesses, perhaps? Not even your super-geekiest nerd is storing 1,800 tapes a year.

Well, of course - Pretty much nobody needs this for home use. But you're forgetting that, beyond those several thousand businesses, there's also the government. We have to back up nightly and retain stuff for a VERY long time. And the government, in case you haven't noticed, is big. And we have to back up everything, even if it's completely redundant it has to be a complete snap-shot. We use tape here because, for our needs, it makes practical and financial sense. I realize that most people don't associate government with being practical or financially responsible, but every once in a while there's a sensible nerd who can make a pretty chart with colorful lines representing $$ spent that's able to persuade the powers that be.

Tape's not dead, it just has limited situations where it makes sense. Home is rarely one of them.

Re:Finally!!

[InterGuru]

"retain stuff for a VERY long time'

What is a VERY long time. Unless tape has improved in the last 20 years, it has has an archival life of a decade or two.

Re:Finally!!

[jimicus]

> Unless tape has improved in the last 20 years, it has has an archival life of a decade or two.

Bit of a shame that tape drives are generally only compatible within a couple of generations of the same tape technology.

LTO, for instance, mandates that the tape drive is able to read and write tapes of its own generation and the one immediately before it, and read tapes two generations back. Which means that an LTO4 drive is not mandated to be able to read an LTO1 tape.

Re:Finally!!

[dgatwood]

The problem is that a 1.5 TB tape costs $50 and were it not for the flooding in Thailand, a 3 TB hard drive would cost under $80 like they were last year, which means that you never break even with tape cost-wise no matter the volume.

And then there's the added inconvenience. When lots of desktop computers come with a 3 TB hard drive and your tapes only hold 1.5 TB apiece, that means that even home machines are split across multiple tapes. This means the $1500 bare tape drive isn't enough to back up even a home computer. You'll need that $5,000 tape library instead.

Also, I wish people would quit calling LTO-6 an 8 TB drive. It uses only a 3.2 TB tape, which is too small to even back up hard drives that were shipping three months ago (4 TB) without compression. So the product that they haven't even started shipping is already hopelessly out of date, just has been the case for every consecutive generation of tape drive for at least the last ten years. Even more amusingly, the tape industry keeps creeping up in their estimates of compression. It used to be that their best-case capacity estimates assumed 2x compression. Now it's 2.5x. They're trying to look like they still matter, when in reality, they're falling further and further behind the hard drive industry. If it provided 8 TB uncompressed, I would consider buying one (assuming the tape price were under a hundred bucks a tape), but tape drives will really only be interesting to me if they actually get out ahead of peak hard drive capacity by enough of a margin that the tape drive will still be able to back up an entire machine in less than three or four tapes after a few years. Otherwise, they will never make sense unless you're backing up terabytes per day.

It's a shame, too. I really liked owning a tape drive back in the late 1990s. The big difference is that my computer at the time was five years old and had a small hard drive, so I was able to buy a used tape drive for under a hundred bucks that would back it up onto a single tape that cost me ten or twelve dollars. The difference between that and a $1,500 drive with $100+ tapes is not small.

For big, institutional setups where you're backing up terabytes per day, tape might still make sense, but only because hard drive prices are temporarily high and because storage space has a nonzero cost. For folks with more realistic daily data deltas, they're way too expensive, way too small, and for all practical purposes, completely irrelevant already. It's going to take a lot more than being able to back up 3/4ths of the current top-of-the-line hard drive per tape before tape will make sense again.

Re:Finally!!

[pla]

Right, and if all you need is a few dozen drives, it's probably not worth it. Let's talk when you need to backup 12 TB every night and you can only recycle the tapes yearly.

Realistically, I have had a larger home file server than the entire corporate NAS/SAN at my last few jobs. And not talkin' about four-person mom-n'-pop shops here.

And yet, they all insist on using tapes for backup. Drives me up a wall to see the inefficiency.

After two years at my previous job, I finally convinced the head of IT to cycle through a handful of hot-swappable eSATA HDDs instead - After we had an actual serious crash and found tape after tape after worthless tape of complete unrecoverable garbage (despite never hearing a peep about corruption from the backup system). It took less than a week before I got to play the hero when we could recover a VP's "oops"ed spreadsheet in under a minute (as opposed to a day's work just to realize we had no viable backups).

Tapes may count as a "safe" industry standard, but anyone using them really needs to reevaluate their business needs. They definitely do have their strong points at the very highest end, but the standard "weekly backup with a nightly incremental" ain't one of them.

Re:Finally!!

[gnick]

Yes, tape does age. Just like hard drives and optical media. But just for the record, up here in Los Alamos we're still pulling data off of tape and copying/analyzing it from our underground nuclear testing. In the computer world, that is a very long time. It was of course stored very differently than modern tape storage methods, but it's readable and usable with a little effort.

Re:Finally!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Full disclosure: I work as a professional backup/recovery sysadmin. I have been working with tape for over seven years. It's not dead; far from it. Now, if you want to argue that there are areas where it used to make sense, but doesn't any more, I'd completely agree with you. But consider one usage case as an example of how tape is still incredibly useful - this is taken from a company I did work for a couple of years ago.

You have multiple petabytes of data. At any given point in time, you need to be able to access a specific subset of that data. You can predict, ahead of time, 95+% of the data that you will need in (say) a week's time. The rest, you don't need to be able to access quickly, but you have to retain it, because it's expensive (if not impossible) to reproduce. Once you're done with the data, you might not need it again for a year or more, or you might need it again in a few days (possibly a few hours.)

So: you could have a very large disk array to store all that data. The hard drives are relatively cheap individually, but the support infrastructure to merge them into large arrays is expensive. The cost to keep them all online (electricity, cooling) is high. The probability of failure is relatively low, but the rebuild time if it happens can be high, depending on how things are structured. The marginal cost of adding more storage is relatively high: you have to get a new array, new disks, new fibre connections, hook it all up, hope you have enough power, ...

Or you could have a large tape library, with multiple high-capacity drives (LTO4 in the case of the customer I'm thinking of), and thousands (yes, I'm serious) of cartridges. The data is written to the tapes; ideally duplicated (this customer didn't do that; I reckon they were stupid); and then deleted from the hard disk staging area (only a couple of TB in size.) When a given piece of data is needed, it's read off the tapes in advance, written to disk, and then accessed from the disk. Once it's no longer needed, it's simply deleted off the disk (since it's already on the tape.) Marginal cost of adding more storage: how much does a single tape cartridge cost? (maybe a storage frame if the library's full; they aren't exactly cheap, but they do hold over 1300 cartridges each: over a petabyte in potential capacity with no extra electrical requirements [LTO4; double that for LTO5], bang, done.) Electrical and cooling requirements: significantly lower; you only have to worry about a couple of TB of disk space, and a few tape drives, plus the tape robot. Rebuild time: just copy it off the redundant copy if the tape's bad.

Is this sort of usage typical? No, not really. But it's certainly not abnormal, and this is the sort of case where tape whomps all over disk when you sit down and work through all the numbers (look at it generally, rather than thinking just about the specifics outlined; they illustrate the point, and aren't the entire point themselves.) Tape's also useful if you need to move large quantities of data offsite (backups, anybody?) and can't afford, or don't want, high capacity fibre out of your data centre to another remote location.

I agree that "capacity after compression" is pure marketing; I do my figuring based upon native capacity (800 GB for LTO4; 1.5 TB for LTO5; 5 TB for T10000C; 3.2 TB - we hope - for LTO6). But to say that tape is "way too expensive, way too small, and ... completely irrelevant" is to misunderstand the strengths and uses of tape. Like I said: look at all the numbers, not just the purchase cost per raw TB, and pick whatever's right for the application in question.

Oh, and the use case I outlined above? It's for a pay TV network. TV shows, movies, sporting events, concerts, documentaries. All purchased legally, but impossible to reproduce (sporting events), or expensive to re-procure (TV shows, movies) if they're lost. Think about it.

Re:Finally!!

[dgatwood]

The only thing a RAID array buys you is convenience of access and the ability to store single files that exceed the size of a hard drive, so if you're just storing individual files long-term, there's no reason to merge the stuff into large RAID arrays.

You can use a hard drive in exactly the same way that you would use a tape. Number each drive with a big, numbered sticker, and when you fill up a drive, make an index of everything on it and keep that on a drive that you back up regularly.

So for that case, the only differences between a hard drive and tapes are A. automated indexing (maybe), B. the cost of the tape drive, C. the difference in cost between a tape and a hard drive, and D. the additional physical space that the hard drive takes up. And even the physical space isn't all that different if you're talking about external laptop drives. So it's mostly cost plus ten lines of code.

For the giant library situation, yes, if you have instant access requirements (a TV broadcast facility comes to mind), it might be marginally cheaper to manage a library of tapes than a library of hard drives, at least for now.

Re:Finally!!

[bertok]

That arbitrary number of "20 years" says a lot.

In the days of analog archival formats, the longevity of a certain medium was critical, because copies couldn't be made without degradation. Hence, lots of bureaucracies came up with rules such as "archival media must be usable for at least 'n' decades". This is a good rule, because otherwise people would do idiotic things like keep long-term archives polaroid photos or fax paper, and then they'd be in for a nasty shock when umpteen years later they'd find that their archives had faded away completely.

But since those ancient times, we've had this shiny newfangled technology called "digital" that you may have heard of. It has this amazing property that copies do not degrade at all. You can copy a tape over and over and over, from one generation to the next, and never lose a single bit of data. Hence, the new rule ought to be "copy all data every 'n' years to newer media" instead of some fixed longetivity. Not only does this massively reduce long-term storage costs as media bit density increases, it's also a good opportunity to verify data integrity. On top of this, media with a shorter lifetime can be used instead of more expensive "archive grade" media, further reducing costs.

If you're insisting that your backup tapes last 20 years instead of simply setting up a scheduled copy in your backup software, then you're doing it wrong. You should never need to go back three generations of tapes. This is not the fault of the tape hardware vendors not meeting your requirements, instead, the fault is your flawed requirements stemming from outdated practices.

To put things in perspective, LTO-1 is only 12 years old, and is already difficult to read. To go back 20 years, you'd be looking at DDS-2, a tape format with a 4GB capacity. You could fit an archive of about a thousand DDS-2 tapes onto a single LTO-6 tape!

Tape never died or lost its supremacy

[Shivetya]

I have twenty terabyte backups NIGHTLY. I am required to keep certain tables (files by another name) for seven years but fortunately not all of it has to be online. I have over twenty terabytes I have to have backed up each night and a specific number of these backups available both on and off site. I have copies of quarterly and yearly complete backups I have too keep.

Show me a disk solution that is even remotely affordable. Cheap disk, maybe if you don't have any real amount of data and are not legally bound to keep it.

Re:Tape never died or lost its supremacy

[Anonymous Coward]

You have way too much porn.

Re:Tape never died or lost its supremacy

[Anonymous Coward]

A backblaze box. 1PB for about $55k.

ZZZZZAAAP.

That was the lightning strike that wiped out your $55K cheap solution where you're storing the data SOX requires you to keep.

Ooops.

Now you get to explain to the execs who now risk jail time why you were SOOOO fucking smart.

Sometimes it really is about covering your ass with the legally-acceptable conservative approach.

Nevermind all the money you wasted paying to keep those disks spinning....

Know how much electricity 50 or 100 petabytes of tape use?

None.

Re:Tape never died or lost its supremacy

[lgw]

Clearly you know nothing of regulatory compliance if you think simple and obvious solutons have anything to do with it! (BTW, tape backup was incremental decades before "de-dup" ) You're require to store what you're required to store, and making any kind of damn sense at all doesn't enter in to it.

Re:Tape never died or lost its supremacy

[arkane1234]

SLAMMMM

That's the sound of an asteroid impacting the building holding any backups occurring.

SMASHHHH

that's the sound of the building that holds all computer equipment for the business, and it's just been ran into by a steam powered locomotive that oddly wasn't on tracks!

DERRR

That's you... for not understanding that there are protective measures already in place in data centers. For things that you just can't stop (the above...), you don't lose sleep over and you have redundant locations. (if it's that important)

Re:Tape never died or lost its supremacy

[whoever57]

That was the lightning strike that wiped out your $55K cheap solution where you're storing the data SOX requires you to keep.

Ooops.

Now you get to explain to the execs who now risk jail time why you were SOOOO fucking smart.

You would probably get a pay raise for this. Backups destroyed with plauasible deniablility. Perfect! Your employer doesn't want the backups, they are required to store them, but if they are accidentally deleted, well, that's just convenient when the SEC or some other agency comes calling.

Um, no

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

'Over the last two years, disk drives have gotten bigger, they've gone from 1TB to 3TB, but they haven't gotten faster. They're more like tape. Meanwhile, tape is going the other direction, it's getting faster,' said Mark Lemmons, CTO of Thought Equity Motion, a cloud storage service...

Hmmmm, sounds as if you're selling something...

1) Big drives are still random access, tape isn't.
2) Faster moving tape is more prone to catastrophic breakage than slower moving tape. (Although both are way more prone to The Bad Thing (TM) than disk drives are.
3) Azimuth alignment between ostensibly "identical" tape drives -- hilarity ensues.
4) Those who ignore the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them.

Reality Check:

[Hartree]

Tape never died. It was still used for a lot of large applications.
It's just that for some things, disks got cheap enough and reliable enough to displace tape.
Part of that was the tremendous resources put into disks with the explosion of consumer use.
High capacity tapes were a much smaller market and one that could support high cost. It looks like tape is just catching up.

I for one welcome our huge cheap tape library overlords! ;)

How else does one back up 20TB of personal data?

[slaker]

About a year ago, staring at never-ending rsyncs between four boxes containing ~12TB of data apiece, I decided that it would be cheaper and easier for me to move to tape rather than continually duplicate data across RAID5 volumes and hope I never have a disk failure and a hard error on any of the remaining drives. I managed to get a Quantum Superloader (LTO4) and a dozen tapes for about $1600. There has been a learning curve with the setup, but there's just no other practical way to deal with tens of terabytes of information.

I was able to move to a single storage machine and switch off a bunch of noisy, hot, power-hungry systems. I was glad to make the switch and I wish I had done it sooner,.