This is the story of a “grandmother” of technologies who will come to the aid of her children. Grandma is tape, kids are platter and SSD hard drives. Because, as surprising as it may seem, these two technologies are not and will not be able to satisfy our disproportionate appetite for data storage, especially long-term.
Read also: Fujifilm and IBM store 580 TB in magnetic tape cartridge
Disappeared from our lives as much in cars (ah, cassette car radios!), in our bedrooms, as in our living rooms (who really regrets having to rewind films?), the magnetic tape has discreetly migrated into the atmosphere. hushed businesses, administrations and data centers.
Two years ago, IBM and Fujifilm unveiled a prototype 580 TB tape. And announced a surprising roadmap for ordinary mortals… but not for the pros:
” Your Gmail emails are all backed up on magnetic tape and French OVH recently unveiled a video of installing our tape storage system. says Dr. Mark Lantz.
Met during the seminar organized between IBM researchers from the IBM laboratory in Zurich and the press, this researcher, who has 20 years in the house, including 15 in tape storage technologies, develops a litany of staggering figures around this technology. , and data issues in general.
” The world generates 2.5 quintillion bytes per day and in the year 2025 humanity will produce 175 zettabytes “, calmly explains the fifty-year-old. Yes, that’s a lot of MP3s. The concern being that unless there is a major leap in technology – and not in sight at the moment – hard drives will not be able to absorb this volume.
” At present, the increase in hard disk storage density is 8% per year compared to 40% for tapes. However, the growth in the volume of data is 50% per year! And if the volume of data explodes their value, it does not progress as much. A 4K film consumes eight times more storage space than a Full HD film but does not sell for eight times as much », explains the engineer.
Hence the interest of magnetic tape, which progresses faster, has more under the pedal and costs less. But beware, we’re not talking here about daddy’s VHS and other data cassettes from the 80s. Modern magnetic tapes are monsters. In many ways.
A kilometer on tape, it stores, it stores!
Forget kilobits or even small megabits of read speed, put the gigabytes behind you: 2021’s magnetic tapes aren’t the choice of IT professionals. data center for nothing.
” Today, a good magnetic tape is 20 TB or more per cartridge and a read speed of 400 MB/s “, develops Dr. Lantz.
How to fit so much data in a cartridge? The tricks are many, from chemistry to how to write data to the size of read and write heads. But there is also the thickness of the bands.
” Human hair is on average 100 microns thick. The tapes of the cartridges are 20 times thinner, since they measure around five microns. This work on fineness has made it possible to increase the density significantly since a cartridge now carries 1,100 meters of tape. “, describes the most simply of the world Dr. Lantz.
With large capacity and rather fast speeds, they take their place at the end of the chain. The SSDs return the hottest data, those which are accessed most often and which have a great need for very high speed.
Then come the hard disks, for the time being, the majority in data centers. Then, once latency is no longer a critical factor, magnetic tape quickly takes over for “cooler” mass storage. Above all, it promises much greater density improvements than other mediums.
Guaranteed technological progress
” Magnetic tape cartridges are the medium with the greatest potential for increasing storage density says Dr. Lantz.
“ According to our estimates, we are moving in the coming years to cartridges of 580 TB of storage, or half a petabyte. None of the competing technologies offer such potential “says the chief engineer of IBM.
An IBM which, moreover, produces neither cartridges nor readers.
“ We work hand in hand with Sony and Fujifilm to qualify their systems. In addition to these skills of mastery of the medium (how to organize data on the surface, redundancy, etc. editor’s note), our know-how is in the implementation of complete systems with robotic arms and software interfaces “.
As well as, and this is quite surprising, in a fairly precise vision of the future.
” We see a limit to the strong increase in storage density over the next two decades. And even then we see the use of MAMR type technologies (borrowed from hard drives, editor’s note)”.
Slower, but more secure
After the explosion in hard disk capacity between the 80s and 2010 and the advent of flash memory from 2010, magnetic tape eventually disappeared from our daily lives. If it was less popular only a decade ago, it nevertheless remained an essential technology for certain uses such as the storage of sensitive and/or long-term data of certain companies or branches of government.
For these so-called “institutional” customers, one of the advantages of tape is that unauthorized access to their content is more difficult. The blow of “on a misunderstanding of the right of access, it can pass” does not exist with magnetic tapes thanks to the “air gap” inherent in the technology.
Understand that until the robotic arm has inserted the cartridge into a drive, the data it contains is cut off from the world, not loaded into memory, inaccessible.
” And on this side, we are even working on how to couple quantum technologies to further strengthen this advantage. », Details the researcher.
Added to this security of access is that of sustainability.
” It is estimated that this type of media has a lifespan of several decades “, calmly releases Mark Lantz.
This even though conventional SSDs and hard drives are often rinsed out in a few years! Which doesn’t mean the tape is perfect. Along with speeds that are no longer suitable for “hot” storage, tape faces a challenge.
” The main threat to long-term storage is the availability of compatible drives, as tape and head technologies (read/write, editor’s note) evolve very quickly. Beyond a few years, we cannot guarantee that we will be able to produce or even repair the readers “, thus tempers Mr. Lantz. ” That’s why our customers typically migrate all of their data from one generation of tape storage to the next. »
Decisive advantage: cost
The amount of the invoice is obviously the main element on which companies have their eyes glued. And this is where the magnetic tape scores decisive points.
” The TCO, i.e. the Total Cost of Ownership (cost which takes into account all the components, note) of the band is its main argument “says Dr. Lantz.
” While in all SSDs and HDDs have their own electronics, components, etc., in the case of a tape system, multiple cassettes share a single drive “.
Inert objects, tape cartridges are much cheaper to produce than other mediums. And less expensive to run.
Because, this material part is only one of the two components of the cost problem. The second is just as important on a daily basis: the energy bill.
” As soon as a hard drive or SSD is in a system, it is powered and consumes power. There are more than 500 exascale data centers around the world and more than 150 are under construction. By 2025, the energy bill of data centers with hard disks should triple “, he adds.
Cartridges, which consume nothing when data is not being accessed, are therefore part of the response to the attempt to reduce the energy bulimia of data centers.
Be careful, however, not to misinterpret these cost advantages of tape technology: they only apply to businesses. You will never see a new generation magnetic tape again in your living rooms.
” If the cost of tapes per TB is lower than hard disks, it is because dozens of tapes share the electronic part, ie the drive. In domestic use, the cost of the reader is far too high for an individual who does not have these storage capacity needs”.
Impossible for you and me indeed to justify buying the purchase of a robot which will manage a hundred cartridges of 20 To!
And after the magnetic tape?
If there are more than twenty years of progress in sight to improve the storage densities of magnetic tape, IBM is very logically interested in the future – because the future is a bit its core business.
He cites as a first track the engraving of data on quartz crystals.
” It is a femtosecond laser-based optical technology that has good potential for mass archiving. But the technology is, at present, very expensive and very slow “, describes Dr. Lantz.
But for IBM, the most promising technology remains DNA storage. A principle already applied today, but whose limits are enormous.
“ DNA is for us the ultimate storage technology when you look at the numbers. We are talking about hundreds of petabytes per gram here! But right now the technology is slow and a million times more expensive than tape. It will take a real technological paradigm shift to see its advent. If it happens. predicts the scientist.
predicting that “it will take at least ten years before the first operational product and several decades before the first commercial application”.
In the meantime, to store our digital lives in DNA, we will therefore trust our good old magnetic tapes.
Our series dedicated to IBM’s Swiss research laboratory:
– How IBM should pave the revolutionary path to quantum advantage as early as 2023