50TB IBM tape drive more than doubles LTO-9 capacity

IBM's had several generations of tape tech in the can, and has managed the rollouts with calm competence for at least back to '97 when I got started in the backup business.

Their research is a prominent part of the LTO platform, too. My observation of that landscape was that they gave toys to LTO at a rate calculated to extinguish the utility of tape research in other places. This means there's a plausible competition, which IBM wins all the time.

This may sound like I'm down on them for it; I'm not. Their hardware was rock solid, performed as advertised.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open#Generations

I would guess so.

Similarly, HAMR and MAMR will be milked for years in the world of magnetic hard drives.

Compression really is a game changer when you're over a certain amount of data you need to protect, and backup technology does some really clever space savings at basically all stages, making it hard to find a good and easy metric to help sell to management. It's a lot easier to tell management:

"These tapes hold 50 TB of production data, and we have about 45 TB in production. Backups and restores will be faster, we'll have fewer tapes to manage for backups"

than it is to explain the different types of data you need to move to tape, the expected compression ratio, etc.

That being said, I do agree they market it too much and it gets confusing, as it should only be a reference for implementation and quick calculations.

If all your competitors report 30 TB*, and you report 15 TB, you may have a better product, but what the people with purchasing power want is bigger numbers, and you advertise a lower number

*with 3:1 compression

Because of this, strontium is one of the most abundant elements in the universe, among those that are heavier than the elements of the iron peak, i.e. among the elements that cannot be produced by fusion, in stars.

There are various living beings which use either salts of strontium or salts of barium for their skeletons, instead of the more common salts of calcium (because the salts of Sr and Ba, especially the sulfates, are less soluble than the corresponding salts of Ca).

In magnetic tapes, either barium ferrite or strontium ferrite are preferred to ferromagnetic metals that have been used in the past, because they already are oxides, so they cannot be oxidized by the air, which enables long lifetimes for the magnetic tapes, of at least thirty years.

https://www.webmd.com/osteoporosis/strontium-treatment-osteo...

https://buy.hpe.com/us/en/storage/disk-storage-systems/remov...

Ideally I would be able to rent a tape drive, even if it costs 100 dollars per day it wouldn't really matter.

* https://www.ebay.com/b/LTO-6-Tape-Data-Cartridge-Drives/3997...

Here's an eight-slot SAS library:

* https://www.ebay.com/itm/385724855188

- Having the data be offline, ie, not available to an attacker which somehow managed to take control over your network

- Having the data be in a physical format which can be easily put in a safe or in the back of a car when there is a risk of flood or fire

- Having data on a media that won't regrade over a period of say, 10-30 years. Hard-drives tend to fail

(The three major tiers are A: I accidentally deleted a file or directory yesterday, so I need to get a copy from snapshots; B: the machine I was working on exploded, so I need to rebuild it and repopulate it with my data; C: archive for some need in the far future)

Suppose you have large quantities of data that you need to preserve for legal reasons -- it's always legal reasons, unless you are in academia or similar -- but you will not be accessing much. That's when you use tapes.

For most other purposes, you want a snapshotting filesystem or an offsite filesystem made from those snapshots.

If you just want to store lots of data in a single place I think MAID still beats the tape at any scale (especially if you want automated retrieval)

The tape itself is quite cheap (LTO-9 is 18TB for $100), but the drives are expensive ($5000+ for an LTO-9 drive), so you need quite a bit of volume to make it worth it.

You can get an earlier breakeven point by buying used equipment for older generations. But no matter what you do, at small scale hard drives will be cheaper (and can be put on a shelf or in a safe too)

Essential when data is created faster than the locally available internet bandwidth which in media industries is quite often.

For larger amounts of data, the money savings vs. HDDs increase quickly.

The break-even point vs. HDDs is lower for long-term archiving than for short-term backups, because the lifetime of tapes is much longer (it is limited not by the degradation of the tapes but only by the risk that compatible tape drives might become hard to obtain), so you need multiple HDDs to store data for the lifetime of a single tape.

Right now you can get 18TB drives for $290 so you can get 306TB for $4,930

S3 is a fantastic piece of architecture and service and the fact that the common dev has such tools and service available instantly from their personal laptop or even phone is mind boggling.

We are very fortunate that AWS led more services being made available to common folk than what had been done in the past.

Its not all about cost or hardware ownership--the value these near infinitely scalable services is easy to ignore but astounding at the grass roots level.

Sony made digital cameras that recorded to floppy disk (the Digital Magnetic Video Camera, or MaViCa), and Agfa made one that recorded to PocketZip, the 40MB shrink of Zip disks. Both random-access media, but that isn't crucial for a digital camera. Could easily record to linear media, and in fact a later Digital Mavica did just that, onto CD-R discs. So recording to tape wouldn't be a stretch at all.

Instead of deleting photos on the camera, you could perhaps mark them for deletion but then have that take effect at offload time. Then blank the tape and use it again. At a time when 64MB flash cards were barely affordable, a 500MB tape would've been a gamechanger.

I use cameras as an example because they're probably the use-case that benefits most from a capacious writable medium in a portable format.

only marginally slower than your average SSD