ST Nov-Dec 2023

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STRATEGY: TAPE STORAGE
THE RESURGENCE OF TAPE
MATT NINESLING, SENIOR DIRECTOR TAPE PORTFOLIO, SPECTRA LOGIC, SHARES THREE CURRENT USE
CASES THAT ARE DRIVING ORGANISATIONS TO TAKE A SECOND LOOK AT TAPE TECHNOLOGY
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As every aspect of our world becomes
more digitised, data storage has been
elevated from an "afterthought" to a
primary enabler of business, research, social
and financial progress. And as the role of data
storage changes, the technology behind
storage has advanced significantly. Nowhere is
this more evident than in the advancement of
tape technology.
The inherent characteristics of tape - density,
affordability, removability - have always made
tape a top consideration for archiving,
compliance and data protection goals. When
combining these attributes with new
technology, such as S3-compatible object
storage, tape becomes a game changer in
addressing the critical challenges facing
modern businesses and organisations today.
Too often, the discussion has focused on
"either/or" scenarios for storage - disk or tape,
on-premises or cloud. By front-ending disk,
tape and cloud with an object interface, the
conversation can now focus on the attributes
required of storage for any particular job. And
that's driving organisations to take a second
look at tape technology.
ARCHIVES: THE VISION FOR AI WILL
REQUIRE TAPE ACCESS
AI and associated machine learning models
require massive amounts of data in order to
"train" and provide improvements in everything
from research algorithms to line manufacturing
to self-driving cars.
Depending on the level of automation, selfdriving
cars will generate between 1.4 and 19
terabytes (TB) of data per hour, as
presented by autonomous driving
technology Systems Architect
Stephan Heinrich at the 2017 Flash Memory
Summit. A single car could produce anywhere
between 380 TB to 5.1 petabytes (PB) of data
in a single year. This is just one example of the
massive amounts of data created by and used
by AI.
Because AI is driving virtually every aspect of
business, research, and development, multipetabyte
archives are becoming organisational
standards. Recent lawsuits over the use of
copyrighted materials for the training of AI
models, as well as defamation litigation
responding to false information generated by
AI chatbots, only highlight the need for this
training data to be preserved for the long term.
These archives must be accessible and
searchable. The introduction of S3-compatible
object-based tape makes today's tape
technology the ideal building block for such
archives. Object-based tape is highly scalable,
searchable and can even be tagged for future
retrieval.
Combined with new developments in tape
density, which enable a native storage capacity
of 50TB on a single cartridge, tape not only
maintains its cost-competitive edge against
other storage approaches such as disk and
cloud, it is the unequivocal dominant leader in
affordability.
Additionally, modern tape offerings provide
much greater data integrity and reliability,
incorporating error correction codes and
automated data integrity verification checks to
minimise the risk of data degradation over
time. In the event of catastrophic data loss or
corruption, having archived AI training data on
tape provides a reliable means of data
recovery as the tape is stored offline,
presumably securely, and is less susceptible to
accidental deletions. Archiving AI training data
18 STORAGE Nov/Dec 2023
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