Posted on 12/26/2020 6:25:28 AM PST by blam
The world currently produces 2.5 quintillion bytes of data daily due to the internet of things, the emergence of 4K/8K videos, and the proliferation of artificial intelligence and automation. By 2025, worldwide data could soar to 175 zettabytes, representing 61% annual growth.
Thanks to the virus pandemic, the rapid digitization of the economy sparking a massive push in remote working among corporations have also resulted in a massive increase in data storage.
So, where is all this data being stored?
More than 500 hyperscale data centers are scattered across the world, storing an estimated 547 exabytes with an estimated 151 facilities currently under development.
According to IBM, there is only “one technology can handle that the massive growth of digital data, keep it protected from cybercrime attacks and is archiving data for some of the largest hyperscale data centers in the world is a technology more than 60 years old – magnetic tape.”
More than a decade ago, IBM partnered with Fujifilm to advance the technology in magnetic tape. What they developed is a new tape that can store huge amounts of critical data.
The new tape can achieve a storage capacity of 317 gigabytes per square inch, which means a single tape is capable of storing 580 terabytes of data.
Putting 580 terabytes into perspective for readers, it’s “equivalent to 786,977 CDs stacked 944 meters high, which is taller than Burj Kalifa, the world’s tallest building. That’s a colossal amount of data! All fitting on a tape cartridge on the palm of your hand,” said IBM.
(snip)
(Excerpt) Read more at nationandstate.com ...
I thought I recognized these.
M... Kay...
Don’t crinkle the tape
So all things old is new again?
I hated magnetic tape back in the day: was extremely unreliable and potentially disastrous in terms of lost data. I was so happy to find read-write capabilities with CD-ROMs.
Pfft - that’s easy - just make it a longer tape, DUH!
Want to bet that the nsa has had thus for years?
I ALWAYS came to grief when I tried to store data on magnetic tape :-/
I hate tape...and I don’t like hard drives that much either.
Optical storage has longevity problems..
I converted to SSD’s a couple months ago...it’s so sweet.
Will it work in my cassette recorder?
Worst course I ever took in college, Solid State Devices.
P-n-p, n-p-n, it was so boring.
Tape rules in data center backup and archival. Always has.
The world currently produces 2.5 quintillion bytes of data daily
The 1970s "old joke" referred to above was told to this poster in the NASA / Jet Propulsion Lab cafeteria in about 1975-1976. He worked in the Digital Maintenance group in the JPL Space Flight Operations Center from 1974 to 1978.
The story / joke was a classic regularly used at JPL to explain ping time, and differentiate bandwidth from latency (and, by the way, the need to document where your cables ran, and that you needed to distribute your data circuits across multiple cables in different trenches - or somehow via multiple paths).
The NASA Deep Space Network tracking station at Goldstone is just outside of Fort Irwin, just east of Barstow, California. When you leave the highway you have to go through Fort Irwin to get to any of the Goldstone facilities. Depending on the highway route taken, and which Deep Space Network dish at Goldstone you are driving to (or starting from) it was about 160-185 miles (255-298 km) from JPL. At freeway speeds (65 mph, about 100 km/h) it was a minimum of three-and-a-half hours, usually four, and frequently more, depending on the traffic. If you ignored the speed limit while out in the desert (risky) you could get closer to three and-a-half hours. This distance and speed also explained how the "ping time" was 7 to 8 hours. Several of the freeways now in existence were not there then.
At the time (early 1970s), the data links from JPL to Goldstone ranged from as low as 1200 and 2400 bps (several of each) to 9600 bps (one or two). The 9-track magnetic tapes of the day recorded at a maximum density of 6250 bits per inch (but some older drives were limited to 800 or 1600 bits per inch). The tape reels were made in different sizes, the largest held about 2400 feet of tape, but due to the data being written in records, with gaps between the records, the maximum data capacity of a 2400 foot reel, blocked at 32,767 bytes per record and recorded at 6250 BPI was 170 megabytes per reel.
As the story that your contributor heard went, one day a plumbing contractor's backhoe dug up and broke the underground cable that carried ALL of the JPL-to-Goldstone data and voice lines through Fort Irwin, and it would take at least a day, maybe longer, to repair. So someone was designated to drive two boxes of 12 reels each of magnetic tape down to JPL, and quickly. The first available vehicle was a white NASA station wagon. Hence the punch line: "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of magnetic tapes hurtling down the highway".
Rounding off the numbers, twenty-four reels of tape at 170 megabytes each is 4080 megabytes. Three and a half hours is 210 minutes. 4080 megabytes divided by 210 works out to about 19.4 megabytes per minute, or 32.3 kilobytes per second (258.4kilobits per second) - over 100 times faster than a 2400 bps data circuit of the time. Note that the incident above involved only 24 reels - which didn't come anywhere near filling the station wagon, in fact the two boxes of tapes didn't even fill the front passenger seat. (as an aside, a station wagon is known as an estate car or estate in other parts of the world). Incidentally, that conversation was the first time your contributor ever heard the term backhoe fade used to describe accidental massive damage to an underground cable (compare it to the term rain fade used to describe a fade-out of a point-to-point microwave radio path due to the absorptive effect of water in the air).
Now if they could invent Polaroid instamatic film...
A couple more parameters whould be of interest:
1. What is the access time?
2. What is the read/write cycle time?
3. How much is overhead, particularly for error-correction?
I still have a dozen or more reel to reel tapes on small to medium reels.
I sold my big Japanese reel-to-reel player years ago when someone offered $100...
That was the previous generation. That could only store CDs stretching up to the height of the Empire State building. This one can store more than the Burj Kalifa.
I knew I shoulda kept that 8-track player in my car.
this made my blood run cold.
IBM will charge you $10,000,000 for the tape drive, and $200,000 a year in support to keep the hopelessly unreliable thing going less than half the time.
DC Directors will cover their a$$es by archiving their archives.
Who gives a crap, where’s my quantum computer tablet?
If I can’t use it sitting on the couch, I don’t care.
Even inside of a piece of hardware there are limits as to how fast data can be moved. Those tapes would take a long time to write and a long time to read.
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