In this white paper, Brad Johns explains how “a modern tape solution that incorporates StrongLink, a small disk cache and two tape copies of all data, provides a responsive and much lower cost solution while protecting the enterprise’s valuable information.”
Read more about it here: TCO Report Response
By Rich Gadomski
At Storage Visions 2018, held in Santa Clara this past October, I had the opportunity to talk about the future outlook for tape as attendees wanted to know how they were going to store all the data that’s being created. The session I participated in was entitled “Epic Battles with Classic Heros – Flash, HDDs and Tape Slay Data Challenges.” As the title suggests, battling exponential data growth takes more than one storage media type to effectively handle the deluge of data that’s being created (now estimated to be 33 ZB in 2018 and growing to 175 ZB by 2025, according to IDC).
As our session moderator, Jean Bozeman from Hurwitz & Associates pointed out in her introduction, a variety of storage workloads create the need for a spectrum of storage technologies. Certainly the need for speed at the top of the storage pyramid is being addressed by performance HDD and increasingly by ever evolving solid state drives.
The need for longer term storage at scale is the domain of capacity HDD and of course, tape. Managing the data deluge is all about having the right data on the right storage medium at the right time. Not everything can or should be stored on expensive high performance flash. You need high capacity optimized media for long term data retention and that’s where HDD and tape come in to play (often in a user friendly active archive environment).
When it comes to the future of capacity in the domain of HDD, current perpendicular magnetic recording technology has reached ‘super paramagnetic” limitations where increasing areal density to increase capacity is not a viable option. With helium filled HDDs, more platters can fit in the same form factor as air filled HDDs but this has not allowed a significant growth in capacity. New technology concepts such as Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) and Microwave Assisted Magnetic Recording (MAMR) are on the horizon but market availability has been delayed. There is also the potential of vacuum sealed HDDs with better operating characteristics than helium that could help HAMR and MAMR HDDs get up to 40 – 50 TB at some point in the future.
But fundamentally, increasing capacity of a storage medium and ultimately reducing its cost is best achieved by increasing areal density. This is where magnetic tape technology really shines as today’s modern tape with per cartridge capacities already as high as 20 TB having very low areal densities compared to HDD.
Therefore, tape has a long runway before facing areal density limits and as a result, future tape roadmaps have the potential to achieve up to 220 TB on a standard form factor cartridge using Barium Ferrite (BaFe) magnetic particles and up to 400 TB using next generation Strontium Ferrite (SrFe). At the same time, both BaFe and SrFe can maintain magnetic signal strength integrity for at least 30 years making them ideal not only for high capacity but for cost effective long term data retention as well.
“No wonder the cloud guys are all using tape now,” exclaimed an attendee in the audience during the Q&A. They certainly also use a lot of flash and a lot of disk too. It is an epic battle and it takes a spectrum of storage technologies to slay the data challenges.
By Ken Kajikawa
“If it’s too good to be true, it probably is.” I’m not sure who first coined that old adage, but it certainly applies to used data tape regardless of whether it’s called “recertified” or “reconditioned.” Let’s review some of the facts.
Recertified? Is there such a thing as legitimately recertified tape? The answer is no and here’s why. The equipment and procedures to fully certify and control the quality of tape performance are available only to licensed manufacturers. No one else has it–so used tape can’t be “re certified” by third parties. Fujifilm does not recertify tape. Fujifilm only provides new/unused product to the marketplace.
Reconditioned? Okay, how about reconditioned tape? A tape cartridge cannot be reconditioned either. Once a tape is scratched, creased, edge damaged, degraded–it can’t be restored to its original factory-new condition. Additionally, a recertifier’s equipment and practices such as data erasure could damage the tape.
Data Erasure? Do the so-called recertifiers actually erase the data from the previous owner? Not exactly. Typically a table of contents overwrite is all that is performed, if anything. To actually overwrite the data on a common LTO data tape would take hours and degaussing is not a quick fix as it would destroy the servo tracks and render the tape useless. A few years back, Fujifilm had acquired 50 “recertified” LTO data tapes from recertified tape resellers. It was determined through expert analysis that 48 out of 50 tapes still contained original user data including highly confidential customer data.
So my advice here is: don’t be a buyer or seller of used tape!
Still considering used tape? Read on for more details about some of the potential hazards!
Fujifilm always recommends against used/recertified media because the customer can never be assured of the quality, performance, and reliability in several key areas as discussed above.
If you are taking the time and resources to back up your data, why risk your data to a cartridge with unknown history?
Fujifilm high capacity data cartridges are consistently manufactured to the highest specifications and standards and fully supported and backed by a Lifetime Warranty against manufactures defects.
The most efficient data protection utilizes proper archiving, and with the data growth rate almost doubling, tape storage is growing from an archiving standpoint. In this Fujifilm Summit video, Dr. James Cates, SVP of Archive Development at Oracle, discusses the advantages of tape for archiving. Watch it here:
In this Fujifilm Summit video, Raymond Blum, Staff Site Reliability Engineer at Google, explains how Google handles its backups and the importance of diversity when it comes to storage. Watch it here:
By diversifying your renewable energy mix, you can achieve energy efficiency gains even with data centers which typically carry large power loads. In this Fujifilm video, Craig Lewis, Executive Director of Clean Coalition talks about how tape storage allows us to do more work with more data storage using a lot less energy. Watch it here:
Rich Gadomski
Vice President of Marketing
FUJIFILM Recording Media U.S.A., Inc
Sometimes change can lead to confusion, or at least to a lot of questions. Take changes in the tax laws for example. I won’t get into details, but suffice it to say I feel sorry for tax preparers come 2019!
In the realm of tape storage, we too have had some changes to the traditional roll-out of next-generation LTO tape drives and media. But rather than focus on confusing change, let’s focus on the luxury of having options. That’s exactly what we have in the option offered with the introduction of LTO-8 drives that can use standard LTO-8, LTO-7, or… LTO-7 Type M tape cartridges.
For the first time in the history of LTO technology dating back to 2000, users can now write to the previous generation tape cartridge at a higher density than previously allowed. Specifically, LTO gen 8 drive users can choose the option to write 9.0 TB native at 300 MB per second on a new/unused LTO-7 tape that previously maxed out at 6.0 TB native on LTO-7 drives. Assuming 2.5:1 data compression, 22.5 TB can be stored on a LTO-7 Type M cartridge with transfer speeds up to 750 MB per second. That’s a lot of capacity… and really fast!
Beyond extra capacity, LTO-7 Type M is a good option economically speaking, since there is no price difference between standard LTO-7 media already in the market and LTO-7 Type M media. This means LTO-7 Type M is 33% less on a cost per TB basis than LTO-7 and 45% less than LTO-8 media at current internet reseller prices.
Taking advantage of the LTO-7 Type M option is easy. First, make sure your tape library is equipped with LTO-8 drives and is upgraded to initialize LTO-7 Type M media for 9.0 TB capacity. If necessary, contact your library vendor to confirm this detail or to enable it. For your library to distinguish standard LTO-7 from Type M, you need to use “M8” designated barcode labels as opposed to “L7” designated barcode labels. To verify, you will see the characters“M8” printed to the right of the volser number on the barcode label where you would normally see “L7”.
Finally, like a good drug commercial, there are a few disclaimers to be aware of, but in this case the side-effects don’t sound worse than the disease known as: exponential data growth coupled with shrinking budgets. So here we go:
It’s always nice to have the luxury of options especially if that means be able to handle a lot more data at a super attractive price!
In this video, Brad Johns provides the real cost of ownership of your data storage over 10 years and explains why tape is the most affordable option for long-term data storage. Although many companies use a variety of different storage platforms, tape is the most practical and the most affordable for backup and archive.
For one petabyte of raw, non-compressible data, the cost savings versus high capacity disk is about 74% over the course of 10 years; the savings increase to 84% when compared to the cloud. Brad Johns crunched the numbers and tape is undeniably the cheapest option for long-term storage.
Find out how you can start saving on your data storage costs. Access the free TCO calculator here.
According to the Information Storage Industry Consortium, the total data rate for tape is improving by 22.5% MB/sec per year. One concept that is driving this capacity increase in the tape industry is RAIT (Redundant Arrays of Independent Tape). RAIT is ideal for large files that need massive amounts of throughput such as in a disaster recovery scenario where you need the ability to move your whole data center electronically to another location.
In this video, Fred Moore of Horison Information Strategies explains how RAIT works.
Rich Gadomski
Vice President of Marketing
FUJIFILM Recording Media U.S.A., Inc
I recently returned from a speaking opportunity at the PRISM Conference held in Miami on May 8thand 9th where I spoke on the Role of Tape in Today’s Modern Offsite Storage Center. In addition to holding and protecting valuable data tape cartridges for archive, backup, and disaster recovery applications, offsite vaults also play a crucial role in providing an “air gap” against cyber criminals and their alarming malware and ransomware variants. Because of tape’s powerful value proposition, it provides this functionality particularly well. It’s easily portable, has the lowest total cost of ownership, is the most reliable storage medium today, and has long archival life and high capacity.
The audience, which included many regional data vault service providers from the U.S. and abroad, didn’t have to take my word on the value prop of tape. I backed it up with studies from leading IT research companies and articles from reliable publications such as the Wall Street Journal. I sprinkled in some news about tape usage from folks like Microsoft Azure. Finally, I detailed the bright future tape has based on its ability to continue to increase in areal density which will ensure increasing capacity and cost competitiveness without sacrificing performance, thanks in part to Fujifilm’s Barium Ferrite and Strontium Ferrite magnetic particle technology.
At the end of my presentation, during the Q&A, I got the following response and question: “Tape sounds great, how come we don’t see more tape volume flowing into our vaults?” One reason for this would be the increasing data densities of tape which would reduce unit volumes. Understandably this is not great for the vault service providers, but this is actually a great benefit for end users; they can store more data on fewer units. Another factor to consider is the ever-increasing popularity of cloud storage over say, the past five years. We have seen a move from on-premises, do-it-yourself storage to outsourced cloud services. This is especially true among startups and SMBs and specific verticals where the cloud can provide unique functionality such as compute and file sharing.
But as the world turns ever so slowly, so do market conditions. Now that data storage pros have gotten comfortable with what the cloud can do, they are also starting to understand some of the downsides such as high TCO associated with egress fees and bandwidth. Security concerns might be mounting too in light of escalating cybersecurity breaches.
So at some point, tape will make sense again for many of the folks who tried cloud, considering TCO, budget constraints and the need for air gap. It’s just a matter of time, as long as demand for storage keeps rising based on relentless data growth. And so long as the hackers don’t quit on the highly profitable multi-trillion dollar business of cybercrime.
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