In this NewsBytes we will review an illuminating report from INSIC called “Global Trends, Applications and Use Cases for Tape Adoption.” As noted at their website, INSIC, the Information Storage Industry Consortium is “dedicated to serving as an integrating force, bringing together the unique capabilities of industry, academia and government in the development of advanced, pre-competitive data storage technologies. INSIC membership consists of multiple technology corporations, universities and government organizations with common interests in the field of digital information storage. The INSIC report is jam packed with enlightening info. This NewsBytes will unveil a few of the highlights.
EXEC SUMMARY
The INSIC trends and applications report begins with a summary that determines “The fundamental advantages of tape continue to be its low acquisition cost, extremely low power consumption, excellent footprint density, scalability, and of course, reliability.” It establishes that tapes inherent design attribute to provide offline air-gap data storage provides “significant protection from cyberattacks.”
As described by the FBI in an LTO BlogBytes article air-gapping “means creating an offline, detached copy of critical data that is not connected, thereby, preventing access by malicious cyber software. When an LTO tape cartridge is removed from the tape drive it is inherently air-gapped helping to prevent cyber sabotage.” In the event of a cyber-attack or other forms of online data disruption the offline air-gapped LTO data tape can be used to recover.
MARKET AND DIRECTIONS
The report notes a number of trends that point to the directions that data storage is headed. Of course, the green data center is on the list of market trends. The INSIC report notes that “Power and cooling requirements and expenses have grown to be a substantial consideration in data center design.” Green data centers are designed to reduce power consumption and environmental impacts. Tape technology can help achieve these objectives in that “Using removable (tape data storage) media that consumes no power when not in use provides a huge power and cooling savings over other storage technology choices.”
The report points out other factors that affect information storage including the data explosion. The amount of data being stored, and in some cases forever, can be overwhelming. Cold storage, video surveillance, and cloud storage are all affected by the growth in data storage requirements. In addition, AI and data analytics “is driving virtually every aspect of business, research, and development, (where) multi-petabyte archives are becoming organizational standards.” Much more on these developments can be garnered in the report.
TECHNOLOGY TRENDS
INSIC discusses attributes that are needed for archival storage including high availability, security, and reliability, and, the requirement to do so for long periods of time with a minimal carbon footprint and low total cost of ownership. The report notes that “Magnetic tape has long been the medium of choice for archival storage using multi-copy protection architectures.” A variety of additional storage media devices and architectures are discussed such as “Ceramic Nano Media,” which is the latest generation of optical laser storage and “Multi-layer fluorescent film storage (that) stores data in bleached or unbleached fluorescent dots in a multi-layer film.”
Another technology trend is highlighted by a quote from Gartner that “80% of generated and stored data is unstructured.” The report explains that “As the amount of data generated continues to grow, retention has become more critical as the need to generate value from the data has also grown. Unstructured data now dominates data generation and retention.” In addition, “software and hardware vendors have been focused on integrating tape into object storage solutions. Most of these solutions use the LTFS self-describing tape formats.”
“LTFS (Linear Tape File System) makes it easy to quickly and precisely locate and retrieve any item of data stored on an LTO Ultrium tape cartridge,” as highlighted at the LTO.org website.
The technology and trends section of the INSIC report contains more technical topics including uncorrectable bit error rate, host interface, and redundant array of independent libraries. Make sure to check it out.
COST AND ENERGY CONSUMPTION
The report takes a deep dive into the cost of storage technologies and energy consumed. The chart below shows a 10 year total cost of ownership comparison of tape with HDD and cloud storage. “Specific data points include: 20 PB stored for 10 years, with no data expansion, 1% data retrieval/egress per month.” The cost assumptions comprised a variety of variables including “Initial data capacity required, annual expected growth of data, annual floor space expense, cost of energy, software, starting media capacity and cloud SLAs.”
There is considerable discussion on the subjects of cost, energy, and TCO operational planning in this section of the report. It explains that “The TCO of tape has been demonstrated across multiple use cases, most common amongst these is active archives and deep archives of data. Tape is most cost effective where infrequently accessed multiple petabytes of data exist. Tape systems continue to cost significantly less than disk systems.”
MUCH MORE TO GLEAN
The INSIC report includes sections on Throughput and Reliability, Vertical Industry Use Cases for Tape, Benefits of Tape across IT Workloads, and Sustainability. Regarding sustainability, the report states that “According to Furthur Market Research and Brad Johns Consulting, data stored on tape that is airgap or long-term deep archive has the potential to reduce CO2e by up to 97% and up to 99% reduction of energy consumption.”
The report specifies in its conclusions that “It is now recognized that a very important application of storage is for long-term preservation (or archiving) of data. It is especially in the archival context that the use of tape has remained strong and is projected to grow significantly.”
As you can tell, this INSIC report is a must read. Get the full “Global Trends, Applications and Use Cases for Tape Adoption” report here.
For an even deeper technical discussion see the “INSIC International Magnetic Tape Storage Technology Roadmap 2024” white paper here. This paper looks deep into the advanced science and engineering expertise that will enable tape technology to meet the digital data archival demands of the next ten years.
CYBER-CRIMINALS CAN BREAK-IN TO YOUR SYSTEM!
How do they do it and how do you protect your data? Get the details in this issue of LTO BlogBytes.
HOW MUCH LTO TAPE HAS SHIPPED?
Check out the record setting achievement.
Want to see some of the latest headlines with links to articles about tape and data storage? Click here.
