Big Data drives tape market bath Fire Reborn

"Perception shapes reality. "Environmentalists may think that wind power and solar power are successfully crowding out fossil fuels and will go a long way in the next few years, and that if you participate in the oil and gas conference, you will feel that oil and gas will continue to grow in the next few 10 years."

This time, the feeling may be distorted or completely wrong. The same goes for tape. It is widely believed that tapes are gradually withdrawing from the market. The feeling may still be right before 2009, but over the past two years we have seen a recovery in tape.

The use of tape currently dominates the archiving market, beyond internal disks, external disks or clouds, according to a report by the corporate Strategy Group, a market research firm. In addition, tape is expected to continue to grow over the next five years, showing a 45% annual compound growth rate by 2015.

Sepectra Logic, chief marketing officer Molly Rector, said: "Duplicate data deletion has injected a strong needle into the tape market, allowing it to grow again in 2009." ”

She noted that tape has grown in areas such as archiving, regulatory compliance, and disaster recovery. Google, for example, has lost 0.9% of its mailboxes due to disk duplication issues. These mailboxes were later recovered via tape.

Migrating from tape to tape

As broadcasters and other manufacturers migrate content from video tapes to digital formats, the media and entertainment sectors have become another important market for tape. MedCom, for example, is a media organization based in Panama that needs a lot of storage when Sony announces the end of its support for Betacam video tape formats. The company's management decided to introduce HD coding. It uses a Spectra T950 tape library to back up and archive 370TB of video files.

"Disk prices are relatively expensive," said Tony Perez, senior manager of MedCom operations and projects. The electricity in Panama is expensive and the disk is very power hungry. At the same time, the disk takes up a lot of space. We decided to migrate content from video tapes to LTO tapes. ”

The company feeds the data to a production server using about 60 "edit bays" and then migrates from the server to the disk archive. In addition to Spectra logic devices, the company has three IBM LTO-4 drives and 450 slots to host more than 300TB of data. The Brocade Fibre Channel (FC) interface provides high speed IO (input/output) for archiving.

National Geographic Global Media Group is another big tape. The organization created a digital archive to maximize the spatial utilization of the data center. It employs 5 frames of Spetra T950 and LTO-4 drives and more than 6,000 tape slots. This system can store all the high-definition digital content that the organization uses SGI DMF software to migrate from the primary disk. This archive can also store backup copies of low-resolution data on tapes for easy long-term access. It can host 350,000-hour high-definition video (8PB) in total.

"The growth in video operating costs is relatively flat compared to the fast-growing disk management costs," said Kyle Knack, director of Nat Geo Global Media architecture systems. The tapes were relatively cheap, so we decided to put a lot of content in the archive. ”

He likes the way file systems are integrated in tape systems. The entire active archiving system has a logical extension. This makes it relatively easy for an administrator to create tools for archiving and to browse through everything in one directory, whether the content is on tape or on disk.

The company currently uses both LTO-4 and LTO-5 tapes, but it is migrating to the latter. The company retains two sets of data on the tape system and then hands over another set of data to Iron kings for safekeeping. However, Knack said they planned to set up an outbound disaster recovery facility to place the tapes so that they could recover faster later.

"The average cost per TB of our SATA is around $2500 trillion, with high-end NAS reaching $4500 trillion, which is not a power and cooling cost," Knack said. The 5-year cost of our tape archive is $1.3 million, which can host 5PB of data on LTO-4 tapes, with a cost of only 264 US dollars per TB. ”

In terms of power costs, the tape also has a distinct advantage. The 5 racks of--t950 only consume 600 watts per hour, while two large arrays occupying the same floor space consume 15,000 watts of electricity each.

The future of tape

What about the future of tape? Rector is optimistic that tape will fundamentally change the future data center.

"In the traditional sense, backups will be obsolete," she says. A central system will consolidate disk and tape resources to manage and unload the media. ”

She envisioned the future as a solid state drive (SSD) at the top level, SATA for logical disks, and 80% to 90% of the remaining data on tape. In the future, the tape library retains two copies of all the data without a weekly backup and a yearly storage of 52 duplicates.

Clipper Group analyst Mike Kahn believes the tape market can grow even further if we ignore the word "tape" in the discussion. He expanded the concept of virtualization from Virtual Machine Manager, thinking that virtualized resources should mean that users can choose between service levels and cost ratios based on SLA (service level agreements) and balance the relationship between service levels and costs.

"In this mode, the user is not thinking about putting data on tape," says Kahn. They are concerned with service level requirements rather than specific media or systems. For many people, tape is a good answer. ”

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)