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How the LHC Is Reviving Magnetic Tape
sandbagger writes "The Large Hadron Collider is the world's biggest science experiment. When spinning, it reportedly generates up to six gigs of data per second. Today's six-terabyte tape cartridges fill rapidly when you're creating that amount of material. The Economist reports that despite the advances in SSDs and hard drives, tape still seems to be the way to go when you need to store massive amounts of digital assets."
Of a station wagon loaded with tapes.
Also, -1, Duh, because this is an obvious, stupid article.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
i remember a few years back backup to "cheap" disk was all the rage. if you were backing up to tape you were seen as some kind of mental patient
tape has its issues, but sucking up money like a trophy wife isn't one of them
Doesn't something need to be dead or dying to be revived?
I work on satellite weather data, and I'd say about 95-99% of it ends up on a tape deck somewhere.
Maybe there are some cases where tape is cheaper than drives. However, Amazon has stated that they do not use tape for their Glacier service, which probably stores more data than even the mighty LHC. That is strong evidence that hard drives are cheaper for the Glacier use case.
It takes too much time to copy or scan one. They don't have any future with the agency.
You can generate all the data in the world but it's useless if you can't actually move it anywhere to do work on it. Tapes are lighter than drives, ergo less shipping costs. It doesn't hurt that you can get vastly higher TB/$ ratios as well with tape.
A gig is a performance, usually given by a band. It's a little known fact that the Higgs boson likes to rock out.
No one in the data retention business ever stopped using tapes. See the numbers on LTO units being sold, if you need proof.
This is a shitty article.
morcego
..has been greatly exaggerated lately by trade journals. There are some backup scenarios for which hard disc backup just isn't viable.
Viva la tape.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
A couple of years ago, Google restored lost gmail from tape. I'd expect that even with deduplication they must use a phenomonal amount of tape.
There are 8.5TB uncompressed capacity tapes in enterprise use right now. The 6TB compressed sounds like, oh, two generations back or so.
French - The lingua franca of Europe!
never heard of it. I grew up with Solid disk drives, 7200 RPM SATA 3 drives and Blu-Ray discs. Ok, I'm showing my age. :p
thanks for the post about old technology though.
Where something like SSD will out perform tape when it comes to random accessed data, when linear storage will do, I don't think anything can beat the durability & cost/performance of tape.
Although, when working one of the worlds strongest electromagnets, I would have expected non-magnetic based media.
I think Netflix puts their data on tape too. Oh wait, no they don't because they have to use it. If the LHC folks are putting the data directly on tape, I am guessing the data isn't really worth much. If it was valuable and needed to be analyzed, it would go directly to a hard disk.
The Cloud is so amazing surely LHC data is no problem for the Cloud.
Magnetic tape has been alive and well. Most big companies and research labs use it daily.
Sounds like the article writer knows nothing at all about corporate or industrial IT.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
But they're much better at knowing what to discard.
I'd love to see a Petabyte-Scale Tape Storage System that looked something like this, only modernized: http://youtu.be/Nq3mNYKR7FM
Sig: I stole this sig.
Or can I sell my cartridges on Craigslist now?
Mostly random stuff.
" When spinning it reportedly generates up to six gigs of data per second."
The LHC itself doesn't spin, rvrn though there are protons moving around the circular track at very near lightspeed. /pedant
For *reliable* backup and archive purposes tape never went out of style.
I've worked as a tape monkey in a large facility (Camp Foster RASC, Okinawa, circa 1989-90), so I know tapes do work well in the enterprise, but my experience with tapes in the consumer space in the 90s was anything but good. 90% of the tape backups made (using several different formats) using consumer-grade systems were corrupt and worthless.
We took great care with the tapes, but when we checked them (thankfully never needed them, except one occasion), they were mostly all bad.
Optical isn't much more reassuring as a backup media, given that optical discs tend to degrade over time.
If somebody has a tape system that can store terabytes on a cartridge, reliably, for say... $10/TB or less, and the system costs less than $200, I'd look at it, though. Otherwise, it is still more worthwhile just to use hard drives to back up data (even at their inflated prices)
1.) Tape is fast - your sata2 hdd will hardly be able to support a steady flow of data to an LTO5 drive (SAS 3/6gbs)
Disadvantage - no random access but that's not what tape is usefull
2.) proprietary - partly wrong if you want to use those vendor lock in products (cheaper drive - expensive cartridges)
LTO5 (and next LTO6) is downward compatible at least one version you can read data from your LTO5 tape with a LTO6 drive
3.) unreliable
in which way ? due to it's crc and sophisticated(develloped over decades) error correction tech
4.) idiots with money to burn buy one disk drive after another if they don't chose to invest more into the drive an be cheaper on the long run as the media price for (Example LTO5) is extremly low, especially if you find good unopened goods on ebay
Perhaps you got it, I'm a happy LTO5 (private, HD movie filmer) user and I occasionally look at ebay for cheap "10x Sony/Fujutsu/HP" disk packs, unopened, then I pay as low as 5€ per 1TByte, I don't need to buy new 4TB drives for backup, where the price per 1TB equals 40-45€
I'm a fan of tapes too, partly because in the SMB space even the dumbest luser can change a tape, but changing out a disk drive on a Windows system *always* seems to be problematic.
Usually you're stuck with USB for ease of use, and even USB2 blows for throughput and I have yet to see a new server with USB3. And then there's the whole clusterfuck with drive letter assignments and the crummy job backup software does with identifying backup media vs. needing to write to some specific path (which is as much a Windows problem as anything).
Which makes me wonder why there isn't a SCSI storage peripheral that can use hard disks as removable media but looks to the server like a tape drive with some kind of translation to write to the disk. This lets you remove the whole disk management issue from the server to the peripheral disk host, as well as retaining tape compatibility with the backup software.
You could even get a little more exotic and put space for multiple disks in the peripheral and do various and sundry mirroring/RAID for redundancy and capacity.
Given the cost of LTO-5 and -6 in quantity, it's probably not cost effective over large quantities of tape, but I would think the peripheral itself would be cheaper (solid state, largely software) and more reliable, and for many use cases, possibly faster, since it's not always easy to maintain the streaming rates necessary to eliminate shoeshining with tape drives unless you're dumping a disk-based backup direct to tape.
My only big gripe with tape is drive reliability, they seem to die more easily than even individual drives in servers and SANs. My only other complaint is the legions of morons inisisting that cheap disk is always better than tape, making you look like a dinosaur for advocating tape.
Tape is used everywhere... The LHC?? Really? The only thing that needs reviving is when slashdot posted intelligent things.
Fact check on the troll.
"Tape is slow". Absolutely false for throughput; true only for IOPS. A modern tape is much faster than a modern hard drive. That's the point of the article, and my personal experience as well. Random I/O to/from tape drives is incredibly slow, but no hard drive can touch a modern tape drive's throughput. It's the reason LHC uses it.
"Tape is expensive": True only in a non-ROI sense, therefore mostly false. You'll find a modern, large tape silo of equivalent capacity to a modern, large storage appliance usually works out much cheaper both in initial cost and cost over time if you intend to use the hardware for at least three to five years. That said, the cost of admission to the world of enterprise tape is pretty high; it's the ongoing costs that are much lower than hard drives.
"Tape is Proprietary": Both true and false. LTO is an open (licensable) standard, but the fastest/largest tape drives on the planet are typically proprietary right now, because being the fastest/largest causes more sales, and therefore funds innovation in faster/larger tape technology.
"The only people who still use it are those who have to...": False. There are many, many use cases for tape where it is not a requirement, but is just more convenient, reliable, faster, and less expensive than a hard-disk solution. I could list them, but, well, you're a troll and I don't want to type much more.
"The only people who still use it are... [those] with money to burn.": False. ROI is what drives most of our tape purchases, and we save an enormous amount of money by using tape in appropriate scenarios. Hard disks are appropriate for some use cases, tapes are mandatory or just a smart purchase in others.
Matthew P. Barnson
I learn what I think when I read what I write
That's the problem we are experiencing at the office right now. We have been archiving to tape for quite sometime when we were starting with LTO3. Now we are at LTO5 (always one generation behind so the cost will be cheaper.)
The problem is backup speed. Our data are incompressible data (video, pictures) so we do not gain from the very high published backup rates. Our arrays are high speed hundreds of megabytes for streaming uncompressed video (even this is not compressible by the tape, which is very odd.) With terabytes of data generated, it is hard to keep up with backup. Our data is regularly restored because of access to archival storage. This creates data management challenges as well. Our main problem is the very long time to backup and restore TBs worth of data on a daily basis. Though it would be easier to scale by adding more tape libraries, but it is not cost effective to keep on adding (as well as adding more arrays to handle streaming read and write operations at the same time.) We are also using LTFS which automated backup software are not friendly too. Our requirement is different from the enterprise backup of multiplexing data from different servers at the same time to get speed. We backup projects one at a time on a tape (self contained.)
LTO6 does not go faster much from LTO5 speeds (160MB vs 120MB for uncompressed.) It is likely that the tape is reaching its limit (much like harddrive speeds have not grown with capacity increases over the years.) SSDs are faster but not effective in capacity wise though. So time to look for new technologies in storing and accessing data. In all, storage has not kept up with the performance improvements in CPU, memory, and other bandwidth links (Ethernet, fibre channel, etc.) We should be transferring at the 10GB/s range already at this time.
Live your life each day as if it was your last.
You didn't look too hard at the ODA specs. For starters, everyone here is talking AT LEAST 100 megaBYTES per second of bandwidth on and off the media SUSTAINED.
Now look at Phony's ODA: 35-50 megaBITS per second--MAX (it is a disk, after all). Connection is USB-3. Target machines are winblows and mac, no mention of Linux or any kind of server environment at all.
Time to fill a full 1.5TB 12 disk cartridge: 48 hours (2 days) at 50 Mbps, 72 hours (3 days) at 35 Mbps.
It was a joke when it was introduced, and an even bigger joke now: http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/04/16/1924248/30-blu-ray-discs-in-a-15tb-minidisc-like-cassette
Not funny enough? Here is more hilarity (the prices): http://pro.sony.com/bbsc/ssr/cat-datastorage/cat-opticaldiscarchive/
Replying to myself: as if the drive prices weren't expensive enough, the prices for media are totally, well, consistent with Sony:
1.2TB rewritable $270 from B&H Photo: http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1010742-REG/sony_odc1200re_archive_cartridge_1_2tb_rewritable.html
1.5TB WORM $280 from B&H Photo: http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/983354-REG/sony_odc1500r_archive_cartridge_1500gb_write.html
And to top it all off, here's the obligatory DRM:
To help content creation professionals manage their metadata and improve workflow efficiency, Sony has developed the Optical Disc Archive Content Manager, which is a software application (license) bundled with each drive.
"The Large Hadron Collider is the world's biggest science experiment. When spinning, it reportedly generates up to six gigs of data per second. Today's six-terabyte tape cartridges fill rapidly when you're creating that amount of material. The Economist reports that despite the advances in SSDs and hard drives, tape still seems to be the way to go when you need to store massive amounts of digital assets."
I don't think that the LHC spins.
ODS-D77U specs are 780 Mbps write once and 1.15 Gbps read. This is in the same neighborhood as LTO-6. But yeah, the ODA drive price is 3 times higher.
The other speed issue to look at is seek time to recover files, which is going to be much longer on tape (often a minute for LTO-6) than disk. The value of low seek time will depend on use case.
I'm not sure where you get 35-50 Mbps from - you may be confusing ODA with Sony XDCAM, which is an older, single disk system.
LTO6 tape is 2.5 TB native, and a tape is $70 minimum. Max speed is 160mbps uncompressed. LTO6 drive is $2000.
3tb Seagate Drive is $100 with 6gbps max transfer speed.
http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Barracuda-3-5-Inch-Internal-ST3000DM001/dp/B005T3GRLY
You're a @#!%ing liar.
Preach it brother... You've got a bunch of idiot SQL admins in this forum.
You hit the nail on the head:
"The only reason tape gets used today is because DEADHEADS whose IT knowledge is decades out of date have positions of power over some IT project. Big government projects like Obamacare, or LHC are the absolute worst for this."
The idea that tape for storage was 'dying' is laughable to say the least. I'd hazard that even in 2013 there's more data stored on magnetic data tape than hard drives, although if not I'd say the balance only tipped in the past few years.
That's hardly 'dying.'
You're a @#!%ing liar.
No, the parent posters knows its stuff. You don't. Go away.
No, the parent posters knows its stuff. You don't. Go away.
Backup your crap with facts pussy.
There is no further data necessary, your own comment clearly shows that you have no idea about the difference between megabit and megabyte, you do not know the difference between interface speed and disk transfer speed. In general you have absolutely no idea about the general performance characteristics of hard disk drives, and I seriously doubt that you have ever seen a tape drive. I hope you are an average computer user or a teenager, and not an IT professional, because that would be a shame of our profession.