Fresh breakthroughs in tape, disc, film and glass herald a new era of eternal data archiving. If employed intelligently, there’s no reason we won’t be able to preserve Keeping Up With Kardashians for our great-great grandchildren. Adrian Pennington reports.Many in the industry are concerned about how to store their data over the next year or two. But how do we preserve our data for the next decade? Or the next century? Or beyond?
In Egypt, around 196 BC, someone carved an honours list in three languages onto a slab of granodiorite. The mundane text was rediscovered in 1799 and finally decrypted to provide the essential key to modern understanding of ancient Egyptian civilization. The Rosetta Stone is the perfect database. It has physically lasted for centuries and its information can be read without any new technology. If only the quest to find an archive solution for digital media were as simple.The world is overflowing with digital data, and the digital universe is doubling every two years according to IDC. A share of this digital universe has value in the long term so what are the options?
In the digital age, tape has proved surprisingly durable. Anyone who has seen the film The Big Easy will know how easy it is to put a magnet next to tape and erase its contents. Tape is subject to degradation and bit drop out over time, and while industry standard LTO gets around this by recording data without the revolving head drum used on video tape, the system needs manual intervention every few years in order to migrate the data stored on it to the latest generation.
The new generation of LTO-7 tape, manufactured by Fujifjlm, is composed of Barium Ferrite, a medium with magnetic properties which means the tape does not deteriorate, and it gives tape headends a longer lifespan. Plus the capacity has jumped from 2.5TB to 6TB.“It's like a whole new format,” says Fuji's commercial manager Richard Alderson. “Nothing has been done like this in the past and we are the only manufacturer who can provide gen-7 tape.” Which is increasingly important given the move to UHD.
“A single movie at 4K can need over a petabyte and as the data sets get bigger, customers are realising that tape is far safer and more reliable than disc as a storage medium,” explains David McKenzie, storage and archive specialist, Oracle.Oracle's StorageTek division is readying a new enterprise version of its tape drive called T10K for release early 2017. This will have capacity for 10-15TB. In addition Oracle is working with the team and the Diva technology from Front Porch, the firm it acquired in September 2014. Meanwhile LTO-8 with a projected 12.8TB capacity and 427MBps speed is expected in three years.
“Tape is far from dead. In fact it is a lot cheaper than disc. It is more environmentally friendly and most important it is far less corruptible. It's the reason why broadcasters like the BBC and Sky choose to archive their programme catalogues on it.”
30 year optical disc
The main alternative to LTO is optical disc, which, as McKenzie alludes to, can drain power in order to keep the mechanism cool. Earlier this year, Sony and Panasonic launched new optical disc-based storage systems for data centres. Sony's Everspan can store 181 Petabytes for 100 years. Four systems can be ganged together to offer 724PB of total storage. To grasp that, if you were to envision one bit of data as the equivalent to one second, then 1PB would equal 285 million years.
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Contributed By: D Narayana Swamye,Email: dns_v@yahoo.com
