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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
if the scenario described in the article happens and only one tape player will survive and prizes will go up, this will accelerate the death of tape storage. It seems that currently tape is still 2-3 times cheaper. It seems only a matter of time until tape will no more be competitive. There is still the legacy issue. Also, tape seems to last 30-50 years. It will be interesting to see whether a hard drive from today will still start up in 30 years. Officially, one estimates 10 years (but I guess it is more as I have been able to boot up drives older than 10 years). It will be important in the future to have cheap long term storage which lasts.
Go ahead. Let us know how it goes.
Hint: you have to be able to produce thin plastic ribbons (5.6 micrometres thick for LTO-7 and LTO-8) that are close to a kilometre long. They need to be 12.65mm (plus or minus .006 mm) wide. You then need to bind barium ferrite particles to those ribbons, in a uniform pattern, to be able to hold 6,656 (LTO-8) tracks in that width, with a linear density of 20,668 bits in every mm (per track). And the ribbon needs to be able to stand up to at least 20,000 end-to-end passes.
This is not a trivial problem, and finding people who have a head start on solving it who don't already work for one of those manufacturers will be... difficult.
You mean it can't be 3D printed?
Mostly random stuff.
3D? But you don't need it!
It's film, so it's 2D what we are talking here: a full 1D of net profit!
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.
ATR Magnetics actually did this. They had their own coating machinery made. That's studio recording tape, though, so the tolerances will probably be a lot lower than for ultra-high density digital media on extremely thin backing.
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.
We must apply blockchain to this!
It's completely unclear the BD-R optical discs consumers can get their hands on are superior, let alone more durable. CMC seems to currently be the least worst manufacturer, all the higher quality manufacturers have stopped making them, and they're obviously not highly trusted because of their history with previous generations of optical media.
For DVDs, I'd go with MAM-A, silver or gold, ditto CD-Rs, which I trust a lot more than DVD recordable media, since pressed DVDs pushed red laser CD technology as far as possible. (Taiyo Yuden exited the optical disc market in 2015, selling their stuff to CMC.) Therefore not going to calculate their costs, especially since their small capacity will start to really affect your off-site storage costs, unless you can stash them with friends or family, and trust them to keep the environment in which they're stored within the requirements (both tape and optical discs are picky here, that's the one advantage hard disks have over them.
Now we get to capacities, if you're going for low costs, single layer is where it's at, 25GB for BD-R, 4.7GB for DVD-R. Compare to 800GB native for LTO-4 tape, back when they were not ancient you could get new high quality Fujifilm ones for ~$22 in lots of 20, I now see a price of $14.70. I see today that Newegg is selling LTO-5 1.5TB native quantity 1 at $23, LTO-6 2.5TB native at $32, and LTO-7 6TB native at $82 (that's less than $1/TB more expensive than LTO-6), and a quick check at Amazon shows their LTO-6 and -7 prices are not competitive, even before we get into quantity discounts, which are the standard way to buy tape.
Comparing my first purchase of 25 Verbatim 25GB BD-Rs just this month from Amazon, to a quantity 20 price from a 3rd party I trust, Malelo and Company, for LTO-6 tape, we're talking $0.0352/GB vs. $0.0105/GB. LTO-5 weights in at $0.013/GB and LTO-4 at $0.0184. And I trust tape from Fujifilm infinitely more than I trust BD-Rs from CMC. Ah, Verbatim at quantity 50 BD-Rs only gets you down to $0.0306/GB.