When the electronic computer appeared, the tape appeared, and now the tape is still used in many types of long-term storage, but it does not play much role in web-based applications. When consumers go to social networking sites to view old photos, these photos are likely to be stored on low-cost disks, but Facebook is now trying to flash this type of data.
Currently, tape expert Spectra Logic has launched a software interface and a device to help businesses transfer a large amount of less-used data to a tape library. Molly Rector, executive vice president of product management and global marketing, says that tape is the cheapest way to store files that don't need to be used for a long time.
Some industry analysts say tape is becoming more and more important in companies with large data. Overall sales of tape systems are falling, but individual deployments are getting bigger, and low cost and energy requirements are the main advantages of tape.
In Thursday, Spectra Logic launched a blackpearl deep storage device that used the company's recently launched DS3 interface. This device can be combined with special software clients for Hadoop and other large data environments, or clients written by enterprise and software vendors themselves
So far, web and cloud computing data do not have direct interfaces to tape storage systems. The tape library has special requirements, including the need to find the correct cartridge and retrieve it. "You need to know how to talk to robots," she says. "This means that complex middleware is required, and web and cloud companies often do not want to deal with this middleware."
DS3 and Blackpearl provide this missing environment, using rest (Representative state transfer), a common architectural approach to the web and cloud computing environments. "Now, they just need to write a normal rest application without having to worry about anything else," says Rector. "The device can do other things, including managing the data transfer process and allocating object metadata." Currently, Blackpearl is designed to be used only for Spectra logic tape libraries.
Behind the device, the tape storage system is suspected to be extended from 15TB to multiple PB levels. This is useful for entertainment, life sciences, oil and gas exploration, government, financial institutions and social media, and cloud storage providers. Yahoo has started using the technology to store Hadoop data.
This usually takes about 60 seconds when a user wants to retrieve data from tape storage, although a photo thumbnail may appear faster. One of the big advantages of tape is low cost, according to Spectra: In a typical configuration, blackpearl with a tape library is priced at $0.09 to 0.14 dollars per thousand trillion, and for a very large system above 10PB, the price is even cheaper.
This is cheaper than long-term storage based on hard disk or cloud storage services, and users can access the data when they need it without the need for additional costs, which is not always the case for cloud storage. Tape is the most space-saving storage technology and typically has a lifecycle of 30 years. 、
Blackpearl is now in the process of testing and will start selling in December. Hadoop DS3 clients and Spectra Logic development programs for enterprise and software vendors are now available.