Technical Blog Post
Abstract
16TB Hard Disks: Welcome to the party, It's About Time!
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Hey there! Did you hear the news!?…obviously if you follow storage you did, the HDD industry heralded in the latest and greatest hard disk drive (HDD). The hyperscale companies of the world will snatch these drives up as fast as they can be built. Every significant leap in storage density for powered devices like HDD, means a significantly lower Carbon foot print. Going from 10TB to 16TB drives decreases the foot print of data by 60%, less space, less power for the same amount of data. Considering that the top 5 HyperScale companies in the world consume more power than the state of New York in the US, this is a significant announcement.
Rollout of 16 TB HDDs targets hyperscale data centers
Welcome to the party Hard Drives, Tape is glad you could show up
The Magnetic Tape industry ushered in 20TB media in 2018. The capability of tape, to reduce the carbon foot print of large data stores is so easy, that we often forget to celebrate the facts.
Facts:
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Tape has so much space available in the technology, that the industry has demonstrated a monster 330TB tape. This is called linear density and the tape “propeller heads” love to talk about it; and they should! Essentially the chart says that the technology used 15 years ago to get 2TB Hard drives to market is being used by Tape to provide 20TB, uncompressed, on a single tape cartridge. The tape folks have demonstrated 10 Generations of forward technology, Disk is hard pressed to demonstrate 2 generations forward.
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The impressive IDC data charts that indicate the amount of data being produced, and to be produced, in the world, has a dark side. No, No, not the Star Wars type dark side, regulatory and retention is the dark side of data. Storing data is super important, regulatory data has a monetary value equivalent to penalties associated with not retaining and protecting it. IOT, AI, Analytics are driving huge amounts of data retention. The more data that can be leveraged, the more refined the opportunities to capitalize on that data. Since this data has to be kept for a long period of time, Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) must be considered for storage solutions.
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Cloud is not a panacea. Service based computing that has enabled SMBs to leverage the power of the enterprise and further grown the Hyperscale capabilities through Automation and orchestration are not magic. The financials of data, work the same, regardless of the method of deployment. HyperScale cloud providers are turning to tape as fast as the mega research companies did when they started storing hundreds of petabytes of data. The economics of tape are so well understood, that the original mega data storage companies like Brook Haven National Laboratory, simply ask “how fast can I get denser tapes.”
Using Tape in Active Archive to Store Scientific Data
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Tape economics is not just about big tapes. The magnetic tape industry, guided by IBM has delivered on the promise to continue to lower overall costs to the business. Since the peak of the industry standard tape, LTO, in a single quarter, the industry ships half the numbers of cartridges to customers and 5 times more capacity. The tape industry overall ships 60% less hardware. This is a great story, that translates to reduced expense for companies storing at least 2 Petabytes of data.
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The industry producing the most overall content globally is entertainment. Between, social media and 8K production sets, digital video has expanded the need for reliable and economic methods of storing and transporting data. When the industry first started rolling to digital content, they adopted Disk to move data back for post processing (after filming on set). To get the content back, the on-set IT folks were sending back as many as 5 HDDs with the same data. That all began to change around 2012. Tape Filesystem format, LTFS, allowed the Media and entertainment industry to ship a single cartridge back for post processing. This was at 1/20ththe cost of shipping back HDDs. The process was so successful that the Discovery Channels set up a standard of video submission that included LTO tape as the only method for video submission for professional producers.
Calculate your savings, 60% reduction in total storage cost today.
Re-invest in the digital transformations that are not funded because of high storage costs.
Tape is:
-Efficient
-Easy to use
-Reliable
-A re-investment in transformation
-A four letter word that we should all use
Why pay more, and get less with HDD?
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