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The Future of the Cloud Depends On Magnetic Tape (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Although the century-old technology has disappeared from most people's daily view, magnetic tape lives on as the preferred medium for safely archiving critical cloud data in case, say, a software bug deletes thousands of Gmail messages, or a natural disaster wipes out some hard drives. The world's electronic financial, health, and scientific records, collected on state-of-the-art cloud servers belonging to Amazon.com, Microsoft, Google, and others, are also typically recorded on tape around the same time they are created. Usually the companies keep one copy of each tape on-site, in a massive vault, and send a second copy to somebody like Iron Mountain. Unfortunately for the big tech companies, the number of tape manufacturers has shrunk over the past three years from six to just two -- Sony and Fujifilm -- and each seems to think that's still one too many.
The Japanese companies have said the tape business is a mere rounding error as far as they're concerned, but each has spent millions of dollars arguing before the U.S. International Trade Commission to try to ban the other from importing tapes to America. [...] The tech industry worries that if Sony or Fujifilm knocks the other out of the U.S., the winner will hike prices, meaning higher costs for the big cloud providers; for old-line storage makers, including IBM, HPE, and Quantum; and, ultimately, for all those companies' customers. [...] Although Sony and Fujifilm have each assured the trade commission that they could fill the gap if their rival's products were shut out of the U.S., the need for storage continues to grow well beyond old conceptions. Construction is slated to begin as soon as next year on the Square Kilometer Array, a radio telescope with thousands of antennas in South Africa and Australia meant to detect signals emitted more than 13 billion years ago. It's been estimated the project could generate an exabyte (1 billion gigabytes) of raw data every day, the equivalent of 300 times the material in the U.S. Library of Congress and a huge storage headache all by itself.
The Japanese companies have said the tape business is a mere rounding error as far as they're concerned, but each has spent millions of dollars arguing before the U.S. International Trade Commission to try to ban the other from importing tapes to America. [...] The tech industry worries that if Sony or Fujifilm knocks the other out of the U.S., the winner will hike prices, meaning higher costs for the big cloud providers; for old-line storage makers, including IBM, HPE, and Quantum; and, ultimately, for all those companies' customers. [...] Although Sony and Fujifilm have each assured the trade commission that they could fill the gap if their rival's products were shut out of the U.S., the need for storage continues to grow well beyond old conceptions. Construction is slated to begin as soon as next year on the Square Kilometer Array, a radio telescope with thousands of antennas in South Africa and Australia meant to detect signals emitted more than 13 billion years ago. It's been estimated the project could generate an exabyte (1 billion gigabytes) of raw data every day, the equivalent of 300 times the material in the U.S. Library of Congress and a huge storage headache all by itself.
Not as easy as your think. The startup cost would be enormous. Very few engineers know, in detail, about thin film technology, it's kinda a lost art. just ask Kodak . The equipment would have to be custom made, no one has manufactured them in decades and the old one have long since been hauled off to the scrap yard.
Another day closer to redwood heaven
These tapes are in massive libraries. Typically you string ~16 rack sized chassis together, which using LTO8 will give you around ~300PB of uncompressed storage. We are talking the likes of the IBM TS3500 or the newer TS4500. The other two players in the market are SpectraLogic and Oracle/StorTek who have similar libraries. With the TS3500 you used to be able at least to get a passover option so you could string 15 rows of libraries together for insane amounts of storage.
The only thing I doubt in the article is the rubbish about Iron Mountain. If you are Google/Facebook/Amazon etc. you just replicate your data to one of your many remote data centers. No point messing about having humans physically handling tapes on a daily basis (well other than feeding Audrey with new tapes). To be honest actually having your tape library onsite is a fairly dumb tactic anyway as there is a good chance the reason you need to use your backup is because the data centre has been transformed into a pile of smoking rubble or a large swimming pool.
Finally when you need to change tape technologies you just have the software copy it from the old tapes to the new tapes, and if they are all in the library while it might take several months it does not involve human interaction. Other than take old tapes out and putting new ones in every few days. You are going to need to do this probably every 6-7 years if you stretch it so the tapes only need to be able to reliably store data for say 10 years. That said provided it is stored in the correct environment LTO is good for 30 years from memory.