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Seagate Wants to Kill Tape? Not so Quick

Wrote Fred Moore, president, Horison

Folllowing this recent announcement, Seagate Wants to Kill Tape, Fred Moore, president, Horison, Inc.:

 

Seagate Wants to Kill Tape? Not so Quick.

Is this what Seagate is really saying? Read the article again carefully. Rather Seagate is saying they want to push old tape data to the cloud that will end up on multiple tiers of cloud storage, including their own HDD products in the short term and modern tape as well.

Sooner or later – after the reawakening (the need to analyze) of previously archived tape data – the activity phase of this data will eventually pass, and data transferred to HDDs from Tape Ark will get cold again and will move to the tape tier in the cloud as tape is the most cost-effective form of storage. It never has and still doesn’t make good financial sense to keep inactive and cold data on spinning HDDs, regardless if the HDDs are located in the cloud or on premise in a data center. Today most if not all cloud service providers are using tape for cold storage. Microsoft Azure is a good example.

In reality, if Tape Ark data is transferred to the cloud it will most likely end up on tape after its active cycle subsides.

Seagate’s very own sponsored report, Data Age 2025, by IDC in November 2018 shows a significant long-term market and growth for tape on page 14. How does this reconcile with “killing tape“? There is simply not enough manufactured storage capacity between SSDs and HDDs to store all the world’s data now or in the future as indicated in the IDC report. Tape will be needed to store at least the vast amount of the world’s low-activity and cold data that needs to be kept for future monetization, compliance, GDPR, etc.

The article also says: “The cost of tape migration to the cloud is no more than current physical storage costs, while providing massive upside and value.

While storing data in the cloud may seem cheap, the high bandwidth costs of ingesting and transferring data in and out of the cloud plus egress fees is where the major cloud expenses lie.

A list of several benefits was also provided. The article suggests that much of the world’s archival tape is old, out-of-date half-inch tape that have questionable reliability. Everybody has a story to tell on old tape media degradation problems it seems but that view of data centers is largely out of date. That’s in the history books for old tape technology – however the modern tape era that began circa 2003 is quite different.

With the advent of all modern LTO and enterprise tape media, things have changed. Tape media life now exceeds 30 years for all modern tape media. Typical HDDs last 4-5 years before replacement or failure. Partial-response maximum-likelihood (PRML) was introduced to LTO in 2003 and is a method for converting a weak analog signal from the head of a magnetic disk or tape drive into a digital signal. This helped push tape to the highest reliability level of any storage technology (1×1019) BER compared to the most reliable HDDs at (1×1016). Tape data rates today are 2x faster than HDDs and getting faster. While HDDs are running out of real-estate to increase capacity, filling HDAs with helium and adding platters, tape has few capacity limits. Future HDD performance gains are minimal hence fueling the growth of SSDs.

I don’t think it is appropriate to say, “Seagate Wants to Kill Tape“, rather they want to push data to the cloud that will end up on multiple tiers of cloud storage, including their own products in the short term and tape as well for long term storage. Sooner or later the data transferred from Tape Ark will get cold again and will move to the tape tier in the cloud as tape is the lowest cost form of storage especially for cloud level data at scale.

The bottom line is that a combination of SSD, HDD and tape provide businesses with the optimal storage solution. Getting the right data in the right place is where the greatest storage opportunities lie.

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