Tape still best for storing the world’s colossal levels of data.
It seems entirely out of sync that a product developed in the 1950s, is still king when it comes to housing the almost indescribable volume of data that needs to be stored in the 21st century with LTO tape.
It may seem something of an anachronism, but it turns out one of the best media for long term data storage is the humble tape. However, today’s LTO tape storage systems bear little resemblance to those first introduced back in the 1950s, delivering capacity, security and cost advantages that can’t be ignored – not even by the world’s biggest cloud services providers.
That’s according to Fujifilm New Zealand, where New Zealand General Manager, Imaging Solutions, Peter Bonisch says the data storage medium declared dead nearly two decades ago is alive, well, and has a lengthy future ahead of it.
“Microsoft in 2006 said ‘tape is dead, disk is tape, flash is disk, and RAM locality the king,” notes Bonisch. “But in 2015, they updated that to ‘all cloud vendors will be using tape and will be using it at a level never seen before’.”
By ‘disk is tape, and flash is disk’, Microsoft was referring to the then-rapid transition away from tape as a mass storage medium as hard disk drive capacities went up and costs came down (relative to the cost of disk, it must be noted, and not tape).
But problems soon emerged: disk drives, sometimes deprecatingly called ‘spinning rust’, fail frequently. And even if capacities were shooting up, the laws of mathematics had something to say about the cost per gigabyte. Then, just like today, even cheap disk was far more expensive and required a lot more electricity than tape.
While the ‘flash is disk’ part of the story refers to the emergence and subsequent popularisation of solid-state drives, SSDs are more expensive yet than their now practically obsolete electromechanical predecessors.
Meanwhile, with the emergence of the cloud era, data creation went through the roof and keeps climbing into the stratosphere. Market researcher IDC notes that worldwide data volume is growing at a compound annual growth rate of 25 per cent, but IT spending lags far behind at 6.5 per cent growth.
“What that means, in simple terms, is that organisations can’t keep up with data storage costs. They need to reorganise data into tiers to minimise the costs,” says Bonisch.
Tiered storage isn’t a new idea and refers to placing data on an appropriate medium, depending on factors including frequency of access, performance requirements and value. “By classifying data and assigning it to different tiers, organisations optimise their IT architecture and storage costs,” he says.
It’s horses for courses and into that course fits LTO – that’s Linear Tape Open, a common standard and specification for tape solutions which has a roadmap out to 2036. LTO is also known as Ultrium.
If tape storage solutions sound terribly analogue, Bonisch dismisses the notion. “It is not analogue; LTO is a digital tape format using magnetic recording technology,” he says.
It’s a digital solution which, in tiered architectures, slots in below the ‘RAM locality’ referred to by Microsoft in the opening paragraph (and by which Microsoft means ‘in memory’ data – information directly available to a processor and the person in front of a computer), SSD near-line storage, traditional disk or cloud archives, and the LTO as the ‘storage of last resort’.
He’s made a case for LTO-stored data being far less costly than disk alternatives at the expense of the speed of access. Those aren’t wild claims, with TPC (Technology Provider Companies, which are Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM and Quantum) providing backing numbers showing a 70 to 74% reduction in costs for storing data over 10 years over local disk and cloud disk (local disk refers to on-premises disk storage systems, while cloud refers to data stored in major cloud service providers).
Source: TCO Tool - Ultrium LTO
The calculations encompass energy consumption, egress charges (the cost of accessing data, in other words), capital costs, storage maintenance, and admin/maintenance.
As one might imagine, with spiralling data volumes pushing the world towards nearly 200 zettabytes (a zettabyte equals a trillion gigabytes) of data, a 70 per cent-plus discount becomes attractive.
There’s another trick up tape’s sleeve, beyond immortality and cost of ownership. LTO is secure by nature. Once written to the tape medium, the tape sits perfectly still, often unpowered, and isolated from the internet. This puts it completely outside of the reach of hackers, explains Bonisch.
“LTO is a preferred choice for organisations with stringent data protection requirements as it includes built-in encryption capabilities and has an air gap.”
An air gap refers to that physical isolation from the network. “Tape meets this requirement inherently as it disconnects on completion of the backup or archival process, providing an extra layer of protection against cyber threats like ransomware attacks.”
That air gap also contributes to the lower dollar cost of operating tape storage subsystems and delivers a substantial sustainability advantage: Brad Johns Research notes that with no need for constant power, tape produces 97 per cent less CO2 than hard drives.
Finally, Bonisch says leading technology providers are using tape because it simply works. “Hyperscale cloud solution providers, social media companies, and the like are introducing tape to their archiving and backup systems to efficiently manage massive and ever-expanding amounts of data.”
For more information: www.fujifilm.com