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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."
The cost of magnetic tape, if the data EVER needs to be accessed and processed in any regular way, is VASTLY higher than the cost of using HDDs. The only reason tape gets used today is because DEADHEADS whose IT knowledge is decades out of date have positions of power over some IT project.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 point about data is that if you neither know about it, or can easily get at it, it might as well not exist. Everyone who placed masses of files on CD and then DVD discovered this phenomenon. Data at hand is data used. Data deep archived is data forgotten. When tape had a significant capacity and price advantage over magnetic platters and optical, it made SOME sense, but was always a horrid solution. The ability to move entirely away from tape, and the growth of that concept we know as the Internet, are hardly unrelated.
However, never forget, it is the most braindead decision any IT manager can make to say "slap it on tape", and the kick-backs from the remaining tape archive storage companies are unthinkably massive. ONLY kick-backs (large, 'untraceable' cheques) keep the large scale tape archival systems going.
Hear about a little thing called "the cloud"? You think every cloud company did not seek to gain this contract? Sadly, in this case, graft and corruption won out. It usually does where government meets IT. Do not forget, the NSA's R+D arm, Google, was created entirely as an answer to solving the eternal problem of Government IT projects ruined by corruption. Google 'appears' to be in the private sector, but provides the hardware designs, and software solutions to every major intelligence agency in the West (the NSA uses 'shadow' Google facilities to store, process, index and search its FULL SURVEILLANCE data).
In IT, your system (software and hardware) is either good, or it is not. When a government determines to have a good IT system for a given enterprise, it actually cares about results. Clearly, no-one really cares about the work at the LHC. You'll find far better, state-of-the-art, IT solutions at those facilities where Team Obama and others work to develop the next generation of the West's nuclear based holocaust weapons.