More and more businesses and consumers are turning to the cloud for their storage needs due to the ease of storing and retrieving their files from a cloud storage service. While the cloud makes sense for storing data that you'll need to access frequently, tape is still used in modern data centers due to its much greater capacity and longevity compared to hard drives and even SSDs. To better understand why companies continue to use tape in the digital age, TechRadar Pro spoke with Spectra Logic's director of hardware engineering, Matt Ninesling.
Ribbon, like paper and vinyl printing, must be long dead. Why is he still alive?
There are several reasons why tape is an important part of the modern data center: First, tape is by far the cheapest way to store data. This means that it is an ideal solution for archiving large data repositories for information that is not regularly accessed. Second, with the recent wave of ransomware in recent years, creating airspace is more important than ever for an organization to control its own destiny in the event of an attack. Tape offers the perfect air gap as tape cartridges are housed in libraries and offline most of the time. Additionally, media can be easily deleted and stored offline, completely disconnected from the network, preventing data from being hacked, encrypted, or deleted. The third is longevity – as organizations retain data for longer periods of time, durability and long life are key considerations. When properly stored, tape media can last up to 30 years. By comparison, hard drives have a useful life of three to five years.
Many companies (Backblaze, Google, etc.) offer LTO replacement cloud-based backup solutions (eg, Glacier). How about an existing tape customer who wants to move to it?
If you're using the cheapest levels of cloud storage, you're probably still storing your data on tape, just not on your own tape. These cloud-based solutions can make financial sense for storing a second copy of archival data or for small businesses with multi-terabyte data sets. However, if you're a data-driven organization that archives petabytes, cloud storage will be much more expensive than a local tape library, especially if you extract and delete information from the archive. regularly. Be sure to factor in egress charges, bandwidth costs, and the time it takes to get data through the cloud connection when making these comparisons. The costs of moving out of the cloud are expensive if you have to regularly pull data in and out of the cloud or, in the worst case scenario, where you have to recover all your data from the cloud. It doesn't even take into account the high cost of network bandwidth required to move large amounts of data in and out of the cloud, nor the time it may take to do so. And, tape is still the best way to quickly restore after a ransomware attack because the data is stored completely offline. Local tape owned and managed by an organization is the cheapest way to archive large amounts of data, and while retrieving this proximity data may take a little longer, the latency is minimal depending on the tape library. You can find a TCO calculator on the LTO Consortium website to help you compare the potential costs of different solutions.
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(Image credit: Spectra logic)
What was the adoption rate of LTO-7 Type M? Does this new multimedia capability make it more difficult to stream LTO-8?
LTO-7 Type M was widely adopted in the first year and a half after the release of LTO-8 tape drives due to both LTO-7 Type M's low cost per TB and problems. Availability of LTO-8 media. Once LTO-8 media became available and the price dropped due to market competition, the adoption rate of LTO-8 media was high.
Computer storage, the ability to deduplicate / compress / encrypt / decompress on the device, occurs on other media as well. What do you think the tape industry should do to stay one step ahead?
The tape industry needs to make sure it stays ahead of the competition on cost per TB and reliability, as it has for decades. The industry must also continue to innovate. For example, moving to more modern storage architectures, such as tape-based object storage archives, makes tape more user-friendly and cost-effective. In addition, the increasing addition of technology and intelligence to automated tape libraries (such as ExaScale TFinity) will continue to make tape easier to use with even less human intervention.
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(Image credit: LTO Consortium)
How do you see the future of the band evolving in the next 10 years?
Tape will continue to follow a set priority of large-capacity upgrades with each new generation increasing capacity, growing to nearly 200TB of native capacity on a single media, according to the LTO Consortium's bandwidth roadmap. By following this roadmap, tape will continue to be the cheapest and most reliable way to store large amounts of data for long-term digital preservation.
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(Image credit: Shutterstock)
Do you think the sacred alliance of Flash and tape will eventually lead to the demise of hard drives?
We are looking at appropriate use cases for all three media formats in the future. Unless flash memory is very close in cost to hard drives, flash memory is unlikely to ultimately replace the drive in many environments where data is used on a daily basis. We expect tape to continue to replace disk in long-term storage environments due to tape's lower cost, higher reliability, and air-gap advantages that differentiate it from hard drives. And in turn, we anticipate flash will continue to replace the drive where IOPs and high performance make it the storage medium of choice. This will leave the drive as a smaller storage bucket where the focus is on the larger 3.5-inch drives.