Slashdot Mirror
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 also sometimes get the "mental patient" stamp for saying that I still use optical discs.
I just cringe the idea of storing long term archived data using an electric charge (flash, HDD, tape). Optical disc has also the benefit of being truly read-only so that you or a piece of malware cannot destroy the data afterwards by software.
I've always insisted on a tape backup system. Hard drive backups certainly have their place, but tape cannot be beat for long-term archival storage. One of our weekly offsight backups goes into a safety deposit box, where sits a duplicate tape drive. I don't want to be searching around for a replacement while my organization is down and out due to some cataclysmic failure.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I don't think "cheapness" is the problem being solved. More important for an organization like the LHC is archival reliability. Tapes can lost a long time while retaining their data integrity. I honestly doubt even high end hard drives can make that claim.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
It depends on the optical disc. If you fork out the money for an archival media like gold CDs or DVDs, then you can probably expect something like 20 to 40 years. All in all, from what I've read, tape still is king in long term storage.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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
Just be careful - optical disks degrade, too. Years ago before hard drives became so incredibly dirt cheap, I would do my little video editing thing and then back up the project files to DVD. And not just any DVD - I did my homework and found the best-rated archival DVDs (sorry, don't remember the brand - only that they came from Japan). Anyway, I just sucked them back onto my NAS, and some of them had developed a teeny bit of unreadable data. Fortunately, I had made PAR2 files for everything. Between par2repair and ddrescue, I was able to recover the data. But the moral of the story is don't rely on optical disks to be magical storage that does not degrade.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
..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.
The bottom line in managing long-term archiving (5+ years) is that you need to both refresh and verify you storage, at several different levels.
1. Shoot the initial copy.
2. Copy this asap. "Copy1"
3. Stash both in disparate locations.
4. Go back to the 'original' on a 6-9 month schedule and verify it.
5. Go back to the 'copy1' on a schedule and verify it on a different schedule.
6. Go back to the 'original' on a different 9-12 month schedule and refresh(copy) it, stored to the other site.
7. Go back to the 'copy1' on a different schedule and refresh (copy) it, stored to the other site.
8. Repeat 4&5 on a year schedule. Do you need to re-write the data in 'current' formats and retain both original and new? Are you moving to new media?
9. Repeat 6&7 on a year schedule. Ditto the rest of step 8.
10. We should be at year 2 or 2.5. Repeat steps 1-9 once for a 6+/- year retention, again for 10+ year retention.
Are you changing data formats, and is it possible to ensure integrity by copy8ing and archiving in new formats?
As you change media, do you need to retain old media systems, or will you move to the new media?
At what point is the data no longer valid, determined by the owners?
Are the 'owners' the only stakeholders? If not, expand the set.
In all of this, you have a dedicated media management system including media drives, copy/verify capabilities, and stand-in for restoration.
This is all very interesting to me. Medical records in particular seem to be assumed to have a lifetime retention, but other than the date and nature of the event, how important are the details of your appendectomy performed at age 5 when you are 60? Is that benign tumor removed at age 12 important at age 45? How much LHC data collected in 2013 will be useful in 2023? Different criteria. Different processes.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
" 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)
This, this, one-thousand times this. I've worked in data centers for a decade and a half, and seen innumerable optical media go bad within just a few years (typically about 3 years) even in DVD jukeboxes in climate-controlled environments. Meanwhile, we restore from fairly ancient tapes on a regular basis.
In reality, most companies don't store tapes longer than 7 years anyway; that's the upper limit of typical audit liability. The data on the tapes may be older than that, kept indefinitely on-disk, but most large companies have a fairly aggressive destruction/over-write schedule for data on tape older than 7 years.
It's very unlikely we'll need data off a tape 20 years from now, but kept in the right conditions -- like the bat-cave of a tape silo room housing tens of thousands of 10TB tapes a few feet away from me right now -- there's a really good chance the data will be readable. While we do have plenty of tape failures (hundreds per year), they are almost always caught at write-time by the verification head.
On a modern tape drive, you usually have several dozen "heads" on any given tape drive, and there will be two sets of them each with its own mechanism to align it with a precision of just a few microns. Pretty amazing, really; if you drop by the Denver, CO area some time, the Oracle/Sun building engineers there can often arrange a tour of our tape testing facilities if you sign a NDA and represent a potential sale. Anyway, the second mechanism will be engaged on the tape in order to read what the first just wrote and verify it before it passes the "successful write" confirmation back up the fibre channel chain. This way you can guarantee you don't get "write once, read never" media.
Matthew P. Barnson
I learn what I think when I read what I write
You came pretty close with the process, but for most businesses you're not quite there. Here are a few clarifications on the process.
I do this kind of thing all the time. Feel free to ping me at my easily-figured-out email address (firstname@lastname.org) if I can answer additional questions for you.
Matthew P. Barnson
I learn what I think when I read what I write
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
Late 2013 pricing.
4TB hard drive: around $400
5TB tape: around $160
8.5TB tape (same media as 5TB, newer drive): still about $160
Cost per terabyte of disk: about $100.
Cost per terabyte of tape: about $19
I'm ignoring the cost of the tape drive, just like I'm ignoring the cost of the head(s) involved in NAS/SAN storage.
To fix your quote to be in line with reality:
Matthew P. Barnson
I learn what I think when I read what I write
Tape does not rot. Bad tapes were bad when created (at least this is true of half-inch linear format - some of the old personal tape formats were crap, but they're all dead now). LTO tape archive lifetime depends on the tape, but it's up to 30 years. You only need to verify tape once after you write it - if the tape was written successfully, it's good until the backing starts to fail.
Your upstream to them is free as well, as you're already paying for an Internet connection. "It's free because you're paying"? That's the opposite of free. You might want to check the math on how much internet connectivity you need to buy to upload 1TB in any useful timeframe - those connections aren't cheap.
Still, it's not all about price. If Amazon gives you a warm, fuzzy feeling of safety then more power to you!
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.