IBM Sets New Tape Storage Record

I haven't heard much about tape technology in recent years. I wonder how far they have gotten with the longevity of tape solutions. Used to be tape degraded pretty rapidly compared to optical disks. Even if it still degrades like that, 220Tb on a single tape :eek: ,makes it worthwhile for a lot of applications.
 
Holy moley that's allot of data on a single device. I still freak out at the idea of 6 TB hard drives failing.
 
You know that one file you really really really need, well, half of it is on the other end of the tape and the other half is in the middle. I'm so pass the days of waiting for a tape to spool up and finding out the tape is bad :(
 
Great, but how do you FEED it that much data quickly enough for it to be useful?
 
Great, but how do you FEED it that much data quickly enough for it to be useful?

Data quickly and tape have never been two good friends....why would you think so now? These kinds of densities are great for continuous backup operations.
 
Tape is only good for analog audio recording. (and looped for delays)

To hell with tape for data. I don't care how much it can hold. Give me a second storage array and an offsite data-domain over this any day. Screw the cost.
 
Great, but how do you FEED it that much data quickly enough for it to be useful?

It is designed for backups and recovery.
Tape is linear, and only in early computers from the 1980s on back was it ever used as primary data storage.

Do you not know how tape works or what it was designed for?
 
Tape is only good for analog audio recording. (and looped for delays)

To hell with tape for data. I don't care how much it can hold. Give me a second storage array and an offsite data-domain over this any day. Screw the cost.

Really nice notion until you realize data storage is exploding. Think about police body cams. The data recorded per year for some cities could be in the petabyte range and may need to be stored for a minimum of 5 years. You really want a HDD array to store that in a cost effective way for tax payers...how cute.
 
It is designed for backups and recovery.
Tape is linear, and only in early computers from the 1980s on back was it ever used as primary data storage.

You are correct, but... tape still sucks for data. At least as far as I'm concerned. I mean, I suppose it is a very cost effective way to back up a lot of data for disaster recovery only scenarios, but still... It's the very fact that it's linear, and typically very inflexible as far as retrieval goes that makes me say this.

It is impressive how much they can fit on a tape that size, but I'd still rather spend a ton of money on an off-site SAN for backup. Not practical in all cases I know, but...
 
Really nice notion until you realize data storage is exploding. Think about police body cams. The data recorded per year for some cities could be in the petabyte range and may need to be stored for a minimum of 5 years. You really want a HDD array to store that in a cost effective way for tax payers...how cute.

I think IBM could be putting this effort into a storage medium that isn't tape then, in order to make an array cost effect for this purpose. Or new compression algorithms, or really anything but a long strip of polyester with rearranged magnetic particles. How about pumping those funds into more reliable, lower cost solid state? Or better quality optics for an optical solution?

I also think in the case of police evidence, it would be harder to "accidentally" destroy evidence if it was encrypted on a private networked storage solution...
 
Even if I don't agree with it though, it's still kinda cool.
 
Reduce that storage capacity by a factor 4 or 5 to represent real-world tape capacity (220 TB is the research lab capacity after all) and you still end up with 40+TB, a very useful amount for businesses.
 
Read/Write Speeds? ;)

Current IBM TS1150 drives are ~350 MB/s uncompressed to 10 TB tapes. Scaling based on Linear Density would put the 220TB drive at ~700 MB/s. Scaling based off of areal density would put it at 6.6 GB/s.
 
What's a reliable tape system these days? I remember the fridge size ADIC that always broke down.
 
You are correct, but... tape still sucks for data. At least as far as I'm concerned. I mean, I suppose it is a very cost effective way to back up a lot of data for disaster recovery only scenarios, but still... It's the very fact that it's linear, and typically very inflexible as far as retrieval goes that makes me say this.

It is impressive how much they can fit on a tape that size, but I'd still rather spend a ton of money on an off-site SAN for backup. Not practical in all cases I know, but...

Have you used modern tale systems with LTFS? Couple seconds to load the tape directory and then its got pretty decent access rates to files beyond that. AKA, random retrieval works just fine with modern LTO-6/TS1150 linear tape.
 
Reduce that storage capacity by a factor 4 or 5 to represent real-world tape capacity (220 TB is the research lab capacity after all) and you still end up with 40+TB, a very useful amount for businesses.

In 2006 they demonstrated 8TB capacity ~800 meter tape. In 2014 they delivered a 10TB 1000 meter tape as a wide availability production product (TS1150). In another ~2 years, they'll release TS1160 which will likely have a 40-50TB capacity. It appears to take them roughly 8 years from demonstration to production. So we can expect 220TB tapes in roughly 2022.
 
I just bought, for my vintage 386/486 setups, an external 400/800MB iomega tape drive. I miss the fun of backing up your entire system to tape, hearing the tape go back and forth.

It was also a lot of fun to restore your entire system (all 300mb of it) from tape, and having about a 5% error rate. :D
 
You are correct, but... tape still sucks for data. At least as far as I'm concerned. I mean, I suppose it is a very cost effective way to back up a lot of data for disaster recovery only scenarios, but still... It's the very fact that it's linear, and typically very inflexible as far as retrieval goes that makes me say this.

It is impressive how much they can fit on a tape that size, but I'd still rather spend a ton of money on an off-site SAN for backup. Not practical in all cases I know, but...

But this is 220TB in one single tape, let alone multiple tapes.
You'll be lucky if you can find a SAN with half of that storage, and honestly, an off-site recovery would be comparable in speed between the two; I guess if money has no value to you...

If everything needs to be recovered, the tape is going to have to run through itself anyways.
The only thing I can think a SAN would be faster at, in terms of data recover, would be random files, and even then, we might be talking a minute in difference.
 
Tape is only good for analog audio recording. (and looped for delays)

To hell with tape for data. I don't care how much it can hold. Give me a second storage array and an offsite data-domain over this any day. Screw the cost.

we got an off site storage for DR only with about 4 times the storage space that is used on the main site , my off site DR storage can restore me to about anytime during the last 30 days , more than that is useless anyway for DR.

we still do daily,weekly,monthly tape library backup, and the monthly is a new tape that goes off-site. sure tape reliability isn't 100% but for the type of data i might need to restore (usually million years old emails that need to be used in court ) we manage fine.
 
So many ignorant statements about tape, clearly not being made by IT professionals,

LTFS allows for random file access, and is platform agnostic. While obviously not as fast as disk, it's no more than a couple of minutes, worst case scenario, to retrieve a single file.

Transfer speeds are around 200MB/s for LTO-6 tapes, with a 2.5TB per cart uncompressed capacity. $25/each, btw.

Archival life under normal climate controlled storage conditions for LTO-6 Barium Ferrite tapes is over 30 years. Your hard drive likely wouldn't even spin up after a decade of sitting idle. Your data on optical media would have been destroyed by rot of the organic layers.

For physical, on-site backup tape is best option by far.
 
I haven't heard much about tape technology in recent years. I wonder how far they have gotten with the longevity of tape solutions. Used to be tape degraded pretty rapidly compared to optical disks. Even if it still degrades like that, 220Tb on a single tape :eek: ,makes it worthwhile for a lot of applications.

Actually optical disks tend to degrade faster.
One of newest tapes currently in use is the LTO-6, and it's rated at 30 years.
Native capacity 2.5 TB and I usually see about double that per tape with compression.

You are correct, but... tape still sucks for data. At least as far as I'm concerned. I mean, I suppose it is a very cost effective way to back up a lot of data for disaster recovery only scenarios, but still... It's the very fact that it's linear, and typically very inflexible as far as retrieval goes that makes me say this.

Tape is the most cost effective way to back up a large amount of data.
If you have less than 4TB of data, just buy a few external drives.

But if you have 30+ TB of data (and growing) that needs to be backup, a tape changer with a large LTO drive is a must. My changer holds 24 tapes, so that's over 100TB of backup, all in a 2U form factor.

I run continuous backups of the most important data to a local server, and once a week it gets copied to tape, along with the less important data and taken off-site. Assuming the computer room or building is a complete loss, I can recover everything from the tapes stored off site.
 
Archival life under normal climate controlled storage conditions for LTO-6 Barium Ferrite tapes is over 30 years. Your hard drive likely wouldn't even spin up after a decade of sitting idle. Your data on optical media would have been destroyed by rot of the organic layers.

For physical, on-site backup tape is best option by far.

Actually optical disks tend to degrade faster.
One of newest tapes currently in use is the LTO-6, and it's rated at 30 years.
Native capacity 2.5 TB and I usually see about double that per tape with compression.

Correct on optical, though if you really care about data retention post 30+ years, archival grade optical does work, its just significantly more expensive than normal consumer grade optical disks($1 per vs $4-5 per 50 disc spindle for SL BD-R). And much slower at ~10MB/s vs 150/350 MB/s for LTO-6/TS1150.
 
Tape is easily the best option for onsite back ups. The speed is only dictated by the speed at which the device can spool the tape which is pretty darn fast these days.

If that 220TB tape was available today it would kill off a lot of SMR drives.
 
Actually optical disks tend to degrade faster.
One of newest tapes currently in use is the LTO-6, and it's rated at 30 years.
Native capacity 2.5 TB and I usually see about double that per tape with compression.

Last time I worked around tape backups was back in the mid 90's. Back then they didn't keep tapes for longer than a few years (4 or so?) because they couldn't trust the reliability past that. They actually installed this HUGE (bigger than laser discs) optical archive system because it could be stored long term. I didn't work directly with any of it, just handled the purchasing and such. But yeah, at 30 years, that would be the way to go for sure. That optical disk "jukebox" was really expensive in it's day.
 
"looks at my companies massive 20,000 TSM tape library"

Hurry the fuck up and release it!
 
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon loaded with tapes. :)

Anyone know if big organizations (google, facebook, etc) are still using those room-sized robotic tape archives? I imagine they would want a robust corporate-wide backup on a regular basis and tape is still the way to go for massive archives.

Off-line tape backups are also more resilient theft or other malicious targeting that even off-site backups cant guarantee against (like what happened to Code Spaces). Even if the tapes are a week old, its better than losing everything.
 
Wow that is impressive!

I just wish tapes were not so expensive. When designing my home backup solution I was thinking it would be neat to use tapes, but they're more expensive than hard drives and a drive would require to remortgage the house. :eek: So I just use hard drives and a drive dock and it works ok but since hard drives arn't meant to be turned on/off all the time I find I get lot of failures. Pretty sure they can fail more easily from being dropped than a tape, too. Tapes are nice as they're reliable but damn, those prices.
 
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon loaded with tapes. :)

Anyone know if big organizations (google, facebook, etc) are still using those room-sized robotic tape archives? I imagine they would want a robust corporate-wide backup on a regular basis and tape is still the way to go for massive archives.

Apparently companies like SpectraLogic have been doing gangbusters. Granted none of the major cloud providers is exactly forthcoming with what their archival tiers are using, but I would assume at least one of them is using tape. About the only other option is Optical libraries. SpectraLogic even has a deep storage appliance that interfaces directly with the AWS S3 command set as a head end for the libraries.
 
Wow that is impressive!

I just wish tapes were not so expensive. When designing my home backup solution I was thinking it would be neat to use tapes, but they're more expensive than hard drives and a drive would require to remortgage the house. :eek: So I just use hard drives and a drive dock and it works ok but since hard drives arn't meant to be turned on/off all the time I find I get lot of failures. Pretty sure they can fail more easily from being dropped than a tape, too. Tapes are nice as they're reliable but damn, those prices.

Most tape systems these days aren't aimed at home use, but for the intended use, tape is very affordable. For example, LTO-6 drives can be had new for between 1.5-2k and tapes are ~$50 per 2.5 TB.
 
I wanted one of these tape drives back in the day but they were just so expensive,
cybernetics%20tape%20drive.jpg
 
Just think of it like this, you want to make sure your data is safe so you make 50 copies of your data those little rolls of tape for a tiny price. That way if any one of them fails then your still very safe and it didn't cost much.
 
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