{"id":7348,"date":"2021-08-12T13:14:19","date_gmt":"2021-08-12T11:14:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tekmart.co.za\/t-blog\/?p=7348"},"modified":"2021-08-12T13:14:20","modified_gmt":"2021-08-12T11:14:20","slug":"tape-archiving-tips-for-a-better-storage-strategy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tekmart.co.za\/t-blog\/tape-archiving-tips-for-a-better-storage-strategy\/","title":{"rendered":"Tape archiving tips for a better storage strategy"},"content":{"rendered":"Reading Time-approximately:<\/span> 3<\/span> minutes<\/span><\/span>\n

Studies show that tape archives are a comparatively cheaper method of long-term data retention. Explore how to use active archive and other storage technologies with a tape system.<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"Jon<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

By Jon Toigo<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The key advantage of using tape for the lion’s share of storage is its low cost of ownership.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Multiple disk archiving vs.\u00a0tape archiving\u00a0analyses have been conducted by organizations ranging from the Informa\u00adtion Storage Industry Consortium (INSIC) to the Clipper Group. According to INSIC, the total cost of ownership over a five-year period for maintaining a 500 TB archive on\u00a0disk vs. tape\u00a0is approximately $1.5 million for disk — in acquisi\u00adtion and energy costs — compared to about $250,000 for tape archiving. Clipper Group considered the com\u00adparative costs of same-capacity disk and tape repositories and determined that, based on energy costs alone, disk products are about 76 times more expensive than comparable tape offerings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tape archiving with disk or flash<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Still, some firms prefer to establish a disk or flash buffer in front of the tape archive to facilitate\u00a0archival data usage. For example, if digitized films are stored in a tape archive where end users can access them — and it’s desir\u00adable to have the movie begin within a minute of a request — it may be desirable to begin the movie immediately upon request, concealing the amount of time it takes to locate the movie on a tape in the library, mount it and get it to the location on the tape where the movie file starts — a maximum of about 2 minutes.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To circumvent this delay, an alternative is to store two minutes of every movie in the\u00a0tape library\u00a0as a file on disk or flash repositories. As soon as a movie is requested, it can begin streaming from the disk while the back-end tape system finds and loads the tape and spins the file up. The tape can then seamlessly take over from files playing off the disk buffer. The great thing about tape is jitter-free playback at a consistent transfer speed, which is one reason why tape technology persists as a preferred storage medium in media and entertainment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tape to cloud gains traction<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Some firms prefer to establish a disk or flash buffer in front of the tape archive to facilitate archival data usage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In some implementations, like Fujifilm’s Dternity, the storage buf\u00adfer in active archives — whether disk or flash — remains on-premises, while tape storage goes to a cloud. There are some indications that Microsoft will be leveraging archival tape in its Azure cloud offering.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Late last year, an Azure cloud architect made the case for tape as the only option for storing the 10 zettabytes to 60 zettabytes of\u00a0all the new data\u00a0expected to arrive in cloud archives by 2020. The combined man\u00adufacturing capacity of the disk, flash and opti\u00adcal industries would be insufficient to meet this storage demand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Microsoft isn’t alone in identifying a role for\u00a0tape in the cloud. Discussions at seminars and in the trade press suggest all the major cloud brands are considering tape\u00a0technology, whether for backup, large data transfers (cloud seeding) or archive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tape archiving: Combating the increase in data<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

In addition to media and enter\u00adtainment, oil and gas, healthcare and cloud services industries, most scientific laboratories continue to\u00a0use tape archiving\u00a0as a means to keep pace with\u00a0storage capacity demand. For example, Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), in Long Island, N.Y., uses a particle collider to conduct experiments that produce massive quantities of data. According to David Yu, a storage expert at BNL, the volume of data generated by experi\u00admental collisions and other work\u00a0increased\u00a0from about 2 petabytes (PB) in 2009 to upwards of 13 PB in 2014.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tape continues to store an estimated 70% of the world’s data, a percentage expected to grow as data itself grows. What remains to be seen is whether big data analytics will drive even greater usage of tape archiving. At present,\u00a0object storage companies\u00a0like Caringo and web-scale, software-defined storage startups like NooBaa appear to be encouraging a shelter-in-place and archive-in-place\u00a0model for their data, storing data locally on hyper-converged server appliances or simple servers with direct-attached storage, then spinning down nodes when data becomes archival quality.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Advocates of this shelter-in-place approach claim that although big data files and objects have a very limited useful life, they must be retained anyway. The companies state that moving massive quantities of data spread over analytics server farms is fraught with potential data loss. It’s also a source of friction — the latency that accrues to any data movement — customers would like to avoid. As an alterna\u00adtive, and to drive down disk costs, shelter-in-place advocates recommend powering down drives that contain the data, creating a cold archive. On its face, that is certainly one strategy for addressing the Clipper Group find\u00ading that disk archives are 76 times more costly than tape based on energy costs alone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You may want to cross your fingers when powering up those drives later on, though.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reading Time-approximately:<\/span> 3<\/span> minutes<\/span><\/span>Studies show that tape archives are a comparatively cheaper method of long-term data retention. Explore how to use active archive and other storage technologies with a tape system. By Jon Toigo The key advantage of using tape for the lion’s share of storage is its low cost of ownership. Multiple disk archiving vs.\u00a0tape archiving\u00a0analyses have been conducted by organizations ranging<\/p>\n

Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":112,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[121,7,258,4,30,152,3,81,238,95],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7348","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-archiving-and-backup","category-backup-and-archival-tools","category-data-protection-backup-and-archiving","category-datacenter-news","category-expert-advise-and-opinion","category-how-do-i","category-industry-news-and-expert-advise","category-tape-backup-and-tape-libraries","category-timeless-articles","category-timeless-tips"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tekmart.co.za\/t-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7348","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tekmart.co.za\/t-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tekmart.co.za\/t-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tekmart.co.za\/t-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/112"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tekmart.co.za\/t-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7348"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tekmart.co.za\/t-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7348\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7349,"href":"https:\/\/tekmart.co.za\/t-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7348\/revisions\/7349"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tekmart.co.za\/t-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7348"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tekmart.co.za\/t-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7348"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tekmart.co.za\/t-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7348"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}