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.
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(Excerpt) Read more at nationandstate.com ...
I wish they would hurry up, I have cameras but no film.
No doubt tape is used for Glacier deep storage. Longevity is the question.
Surely some kind of cassette needs inventing.
With Sram making a big cache it should be pretty fast.
The old reel tape drives were pretty fun. Very sophisticated machines.
I would add...
4. What is the total capacity of a cartridge?
5. How long to completely fill a tape cartridge?
6. How long is the tape expected to last?
I used to shag tapes for a living. IBM data cartridges were lots easier to deal with than reels of tape.
A lot of times, that is the result of head drift on the helical scan heads. That is why it is critical to periodically cut a tape on one drive, and read it on another. That used to be part of my job, after the first time we had a tape drive failure, and then found we couldn't read anything that had been written by that drive for the past year or so. It would read/write fine on that one drive, but we didn't notice the issue until the drive completely crapped out. We had an entire year's worth of backups that were essentially useless without spending major money to have a hardware guy tweak the heads until it would read it.
There are a lot of things you can do to help you maintain tape-based media. One of my favorite hints to folks back when VHS was still a thing, is that you always played the movie all the way to the end, then did not rewind. You only rewind the tape right before you watch it. This will make your tapes last a lot longer, and not have weird 'stretch' issues, among other things.
I didn’t want to say Alpha Microsystems was the vendor. Back in the day, they were selling 68000-based systems, running what looked like a TOPS-10 knockoff OS, to system integrators for custom hardware & software solutions.
I wasn’t sure if Alpha Micro had produced a mass-market version of their backup product.
I have a bunch of 4-track and 8-track tape cartridges from the 1960s. I thought the magnetic tape would go bad over the years. Nope. Problem is that the foam and rubber disintegrated on many cartridges, but the magnetic tape is still good. I have a few players and recorders that still work, but shy away from playing the remaining tapes. (Also have some 9-track tape reels from my work on mainframes in the 1970s but no device for them...).
I transferred to digital some 8mm color movies that my father shot between 1938-40. The splices had often dried out and failed, but the films themselves and the color was as if they were shot yesterday. Kodacolor lasts at least!
You're lucky! I tried to transfer some of my dad's 8mm movies from the 1950s & 1960s but half of them turned into goop. This was about 20 years ago, and the nitrate film had dissolved, probably because the cans weren't airtight. Only got a few converted.
Good lord, the powers that be want to drive us back to the days of Tape media? Ugh.
In twenty years we’ll just refer to it as 8 track II.
Not sure what data centers you are working in but tapes have been a thing of the past for the better part of a decade.
Bummer. The truth is any media is subject to failure. It's a corollary of the general adversity of the universe towards meaningful organization, aka the massive slide into entropy.
Once you recognize this you can provide a engineering solution which accommodates the inevitable with some margin of tolerance...
Speaking as a person who has designed, engineered, and managed massive data processing and storage systems since the era of mag tape reels (which were mounted by hand!) - I can still remember the thrills of processing and ensuring access and fault tolerance and disaster recovery for a tape library that imported thousands of new reels each month. Every day my operators would fill the bin with unrecoverable magtapes. I had hundreds of tape drives, a small herd of lesser mainframes to keep things going, a disk drive farm measurable in acres, and the IBM tech would be working on one or more things every day. Something went wrong every day, and it was in the plan to find it and deal with it. Flash forward 20 years and the same size operation with equivalent tape storage fit on a couple of rack mount cabinets, only because I kept it in two data centers. By 2015 the equivalent fit in 12U of rack space and was online, but we kept multiples in different locations and an off-line tape archive for assuring recoverability guarantees.
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