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"Tape Technology Leaps Forward in The 3rd Era" Some Significant Challenges to Disk Storage August 5, 2010, Volume 150, Issue 1
The developments in tape technology, now in its third generation and including such changes as significantly improved drive and library reliability, longer media life, higher drive duty cycles and much faster data rates than any previous generation of tape technology, plus tape cartridge capacities that now exceed those of disk drives, call for a re-examination of the common perceptions of tape storage, argues Fred Moore in his paper "Tape Technology Leaps Forward in the 3rd Era." Moore details the three eras of magnetic tape technology, beginning with the first tape drive in 1952. The first era was the era of manual tape and lasted from 1952 until 1987. By 1987, tape environments had grown to thousands of tapes and the manual media handling problems were major concerns for these enterprise companies, which ushered in the second era beginning in 1988. This was the era of tape automation with the introduction of the industry’s first successful robotic tape library by StorageTek, Moore writes. The third and current era began in 2000, Moore continues, in response to the growing perception that disk had become cheaper than tape. This challenge was met by the tape industry undertaking a fundamental re-engineering of itself and resulting in the changes outlined in the preceding paragraph. Moore predicts that cartridge tape capacities will continue their unprecedented growth pace that will produce capacities approaching 60 terabytes by 2019. Tiered storage systems that include tape will proliferate to the non-mainframe and midrange markets, Moore continues, adding that some of these will present a disk image for integration with archive applications. Further, tape Write Once, Read Many (WORM) and the growing requirement for encryption will address data protection for the compliance and archival markets, Moore argues, addressing the growing concern over data security. What is perhaps most compelling is the trend in average price per gigabyte for automated tape library storage, which is expected to remain below that of magnetic disk storage for at least the next 10 years, says Moore. What is more, he writes, the operating expense (opex) for automated tape systems should remain significantly below that of online storage even as people, facilities and energy costs rise. Pitted against disk storage, Moore points out that the average tape library administrator manages from 40TB to more than 1PB (varies based on capacity of a single library) of data. Today’s storage administrator currently manages an average nearly 30 TB for non-mainframe disk and over 100 TB for mainframe disk storage. There is a further advantage in tape storage, Moore notes, in that the promised cost effectiveness of network bandwidth as an alternative to physical transport for moving large amounts of data has yet to materialize. The growth rate of the data that needs to be backed up continues to exceed the rate of growth of affordable bandwidth, he observes, concluding that this gives tape a financial advantage over disk as an off-site backup technology, along with the lower energy cost of tape versus disk over the lifetime of the stored data. Finally, Moore, writes tape has a much longer storage life than disk, eliminating the need to move data to new media as frequently during its lifetime. More Information
Is Replacing Tape Storage Truly Cost Saving?
Tape Storage's Future Secure Under Oracle
[...read more...]
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Magnetic tape technology is making a comeback, according to Fred Moore
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"Tape Technology Leaps Forward in The 3rd Era"
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