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IBM Prepares 100-Terabyte Tape Drives

Posted by timothy on Sun Dec 26, 2004 01:01 PM
from the your-base-has-been-digitized dept.
Technology
Roland Piquepaille writes "It's a well-known fact that we're living in an era of data explosion, and that it's not about to stop. So it's not really surprising that IBM researchers are eyeing 100T-byte tape drive. Yes, you read correctly. They want to increase the capacity storage of their largest units by 250 times, from 400 GB to 100 TB. In order to achieve this goal, they're borrowing "nanopatterning" techniques derived from the microprocessor division. Today, the size of a tape track is about 10 microns. They want to reduce it to 0.5 micron -- or 500 nanometers -- in about five years. IBM doesn't really say when a 100-Terabyte tape drive will be available. But more importantly, the company doesn't say a word about future data transfer rates, which today reach a 80 MB/s. Read this overview for more comments about this problem of data transfer rates."
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  • PR0N! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 26 2004, @01:10PM (#11185615)
    That's _alot_ of pr0n.

  • I bet it's worth the money... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by agent dero (680753) on Sunday December 26 2004, @01:16PM (#11185641) Homepage
    ...I mean, I'm sure I could back up my entire life to one of these things... ;)

    Seriously, imagine backing up every single thing you've ever heard, seen, or read. 40TB maybe? ;)

    • Re:I bet it's worth the money... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by MP3Chuck (652277) on Sunday December 26 2004, @01:29PM (#11185704) Homepage Journal
      Well ... 74 minutes of stereo 16-bit 44.1khz audio is about 650MB. 8.783MB/minute. For the sake of argument, let's assume a 100 year lifespan. 100 years = 52,594,876.6 minutes. 461,982,024.189 MB (440.580 TB) for 100 years of CD-quality audio. Convert to 128 kb/s MP3 and you're looking at about 44TB, give or take. (128kbps .MP3 is about 1/10 size of a .wav).

      So in a sense you are quite right! :)
    • Just remember that if you use tape to backup... there's a good chance you won't get a valid restore. I wouldn't bet my life on it is all I'm saying...
      • I don't know a whole lot about tape backup, so I'm curious why you said that. Tape backup is pretty popular for large jobs, but is it common to have corrupt data on the tape? Seems to me that if it were the case, tape wouldn't be as popular. What am I missing?

    • Re:I bet it's worth the money... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by nyri (132206) on Sunday December 26 2004, @04:11PM (#11186405)
      I'm sure I could back up my entire life to one of these things

      I heard that the information flux you receive trough your sensory devices (eyes, ears, etc.) is 20Gb/s. This value is purely anecdotal but it does sound right. For the sake of the argument, let's pretend that the value is correct.

      Let's assume that you live 100years=3 153 600 000s =~ 3Gs. This means that experience being you can be stored to 60Pb. Of cause we need to know your genetic make-up but that is peanuts compared to 60Pb. 60Pb is 75 100TB tapes. This means that if you can compress your sensory data to 1/75=1.4% from the original size, you can, in fact, store your whole life to one of these tapes.

      The compression rate is, in my humble opinion, reachable. First of all, people spend most of their life sleeping. Second of all people ignore most of the data they receive. And third, the perception of the world is far from chaotic and therefore compressible.

      So yes, you are correct: These tapes are capable to store entire human life, if we come up with a mean to record it.
    • the capacity of your brain. your brain has about 100Gig of neurons. each with about 1000 connections to other neurons each associated with a "weight" that store the information. so if we assume 16bit weight.. we have a raw 200TByte of information storage in your brain...a lot of this is propablay wasted for basic live functioning....

  • tape drives? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 26 2004, @01:16PM (#11185642)
    What do they have in mind, they want to build the world's largest Turing machine?
  • Laser holography ?

  • 100 TB from IBM - Not a problem! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by MMC Monster (602931) on Sunday December 26 2004, @01:18PM (#11185651)
    If anyone can do it, it's big blue. I remember when they first USB key drives were widely available from IBM. 8mb and 16mb form factors. I talked to a guy I knew at IBM, who smiled at me and told me to expect 1 GB form factors within a year. (Not that I would be able to afford them. :-) ) The boys at IBM can create anything they put their minds to. Marketing is another matter.
  • ... a beowulf cluster of these !
    At least with some striping, they can resolve the speed issue.

    (yay I know it's the 10^14th time we mention beowulf)

  • Data transfer rates (Score:5, Interesting)

    by IO ERROR (128968) * <error.ioerror@us> on Sunday December 26 2004, @01:22PM (#11185667) Homepage Journal
    We have to solve the problem of data transfer rates. It is patently silly to wait three days for your 100TB backup to finish.

    I don't know where the solution here will come from, but I expect for the meantime this kind of large capacity will be used more for archival storage of old data than for backup.

    Is there any research out there into the data transfer rate problem?

    • I'm sure there is. IBM (and others) spend a lot of money trying to figure out what will be hot tech in 5-15 years. Whenever this 100TB tape hits the market I would bet IBM will have found a way to make it run at a reasonable speed.
    • "It is patently silly to wait three days for your 100TB backup to finish."

      no, it is not. assuming you have 100TB to fill the entire tape, you probably want that data. And 3 days compared to the time it took to aquire all that data it is probably a drop in the bucket.

      Man ONLY 3 days to get my 100TB data? sweet!

      "Is there any research out there into the data transfer rate problem?"

      No. None what so ever. The couldn't possible be any money in it....

      really, use your head to think, will ya!
    • The data transfer rate problem can be solved with money. Recording heads can be designed with a large number of independent tracks. Wider tape allows for more tracks. Better tape handling and servo systems support higher tape speeds. All of this costs serious money, but it can be done.
    • Depends. What if you can run multiple high capacity tapes at the same time? Even if they hit 10TB, software that can deal with 4 drives at once, in some sort of inteligible fashion, might not be bad. Raid5 tapes anyone?
    • Well if you increase data density 250 times you can probably increase data transfer almost the same amount, so in theory these drives will do ~20GB/s. Now today trying to feed data that fast would be a problem since even the fastest Fiberchannel is 10Gb/s or 1GB/s. I imagine in 5 years that they can figure out how to improve Fiberchannel performance a measly 20x =) 1.4 hours to fill a 100TB tape sounds pretty damn good to me!
  • Heck, even if you were to connect a drive like that to the firewire-800 port (800mbps) port on a new (today) PowerMac G5, it'd take over 277 HOURS to fill that tape! (assuming complete bus saturation and an 8-bit-byte)

  • Roland Piquepaille Spam and Slashdot (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 26 2004, @01:23PM (#11185671)

    Roland Piquepaille and Slashdot: Is there a connection?

    I think most of you are aware of the controversy surrounding regular Slashdot article submitter Roland Piquepaille. For those of you who don't know, please allow me to bring forth all the facts. Roland Piquepaille has an online journal (I refuse to use the word "blog") located at www.primidi.com [primidi.com]. It is titled "Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends". It consists almost entirely of content, both text and pictures, taken from reputable news websites and online technical journals. He does give credit to the other websites, but it wasn't always so. Only after many complaints were raised by the Slashdot readership did he start giving credit where credit was due. However, this is not what the controversy is about.

    Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends serves online advertisements through a service called Blogads, located at www.blogads.com. Blogads is not your traditional online advertiser; rather than base payments on click-throughs, Blogads pays a flat fee based on the level of traffic your online journal generates. This way Blogads can guarantee that an advertisement on a particular online journal will reach a particular number of users. So advertisements on high traffic online journals are appropriately more expensive to buy, but the advertisement is guaranteed to be seen by a large amount of people. This, in turn, encourages people like Roland Piquepaille to try their best to increase traffic to their journals in order to increase the going rates for advertisements on their web pages. But advertisers do have some flexibility. Blogads serves two classes of advertisements. The premium ad space that is seen at the top of the web page by all viewers is reserved for "Special Advertisers"; it holds only one advertisement. The secondary ad space is located near the bottom half of the page, so that the user must scroll down the window to see it. This space can contain up to four advertisements and is reserved for regular advertisers, or just "Advertisers". Visit Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends (www.primidi.com [primidi.com]) to see it for yourself.

    Before we talk about money, let's talk about the service that Roland Piquepaille provides in his journal. He goes out and looks for interesting articles about new and emerging technologies. He provides a very brief overview of the articles, then copies a few choice paragraphs and the occasional picture from each article and puts them up on his web page. Finally, he adds a minimal amount of original content between the copied-and-pasted text in an effort to make the journal entry coherent and appear to add value to the original articles. Nothing more, nothing less.

    Now let's talk about money. Visit http://www.blogads.com/order_html?adstrip_category =tech&politics= [blogads.com] to check the following facts for yourself. As of today, December XX 2004, the going rate for the premium advertisement space on Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends is $375 for one month. One of the four standard advertisements costs $150 for one month. So, the maximum advertising space brings in $375 x 1 + $150 x 4 = $975 for one month. Obviously not all $975 will go directly to Roland Piquepaille, as Blogads gets a portion of that as a service fee, but he will receive the majority of it. According to the FAQ [blogads.com], Blogads takes 20%. So Roland Piquepaille gets 80% of $975, a maximum of $780 each month. www.primidi.com is hosted by clara.net (look it up at http://www.networksolutions.com/en_US/whois/index. jhtml [networksolutions.com] [networksolutions.com]). Browsing clara.net's hosting solutions, the most expensive hosting service is their Clarahost Advanced (http:// [clara.net]

  • Size of reel (Score:3, Insightful)

    by k4_pacific (736911) <k4_pacific.yahoo@com> on Sunday December 26 2004, @01:28PM (#11185694) Homepage Journal
    You can do this today. Just make it hold a much bigger reel.
    • The moment of inertia when these things are spinning though concerns me. You'd have to slow the wheel down very gradually as to not destroy the tape.

  • Data rates not a problem (Score:4, Informative)

    by smoon (16873) on Sunday December 26 2004, @01:35PM (#11185732) Homepage
    The IBM enterprise SAN device -- shark -- is only able to crank data out at about 35MB/s per disk pack, assuming sole access. When you've got multiple systems hitting one disk pack it drops dramatically from that.

    So 80MB/s is more than their disk systems can do anyway, unless you're pulling data from multiple packs.
    • The shark is fairly out of date now, it was based on ssa technology which was much better than the scsi stuff out at the time, but fibre channel is much quicker.

      of course, a large part of the shark is its massively parallel, 35MB/s per disk pack, but possibly 100s of disk packs per system, with 2 dedicated servers making it all transparent.

      The replacement for the shark, the ds8000, can have 256GB of memory cache to buffer the disks and has a claimed 200MB/s throughput per port on a 4 port fibre channel ad

  • Yeah, lose 100TB of data in a single backup (Score:3, Interesting)

    by melted (227442) on Sunday December 26 2004, @01:59PM (#11185845) Homepage
    Now that's an awesome possibility. It's about time storage-related companies start worrying about reliability and longevity of their storage solutions instead of trying to impress everyone with capacity.
      • decide what to use. For me, 200-300GB tape drive would be OK if I KNEW the data won't go bad in 25 years (at least) if cassettes are properly stored (cool, dry place, no strong magnetic fields).

        And then I'd just dump all my data onto a few cassettes, and send one set to my relatives 5000 miles away.

        100TB is useless if you know the data will "die" in a few years.
  • The next version of Microsoft Office fits on two of these.
  • "His group of ten researchers hopes to shrink that size down to about 0.5 micron, or 500 nanometers, within the next five years. "This will carry us all the way to the 100T byte regime," he said.....Magnetic particles painted on today's tapes are about one micron..."

    If we have one micron now, and 0.5 micron allows for 100T byte tapes, why don't we have 50T byte now?

    • The simple answer is that the data is not stored and to end - - - - - in a linear array. The data is stored in a 2 dimensional grid, using both the width of the tape as well as the linear position on the reel to store data. In many cases, the data is stored in a biased array of rows /////

      Thus the data density depends on not just the size of the individual particles storing the bits, but also on the possible arrangement of the grid, be it rectangular, biased arrays, hexoganal, etc.

      Additionally, most backup systems include redundancy in the written patterns, to protect against degradation due to environmentla exposure. The most common I am familiar with is the storage of a reversible cyclic redundancy check (CRC) in the written blocks. The block size varies from program to program, as does the compression algorithm chosen.

      So if we assume a rectangular array of bits, with mild bias, we get a grid #. If each bit on the grid is halved in size, the data density, barring other changes, is quadrupled. Changes to the pattern made possible may increase this further, as well as advances in the heads.

      Current heads can only read at a certain speed, so a trade off is made between spool speed and data density, meaning that not 100% of the space on the tape is lines of data, there is alos white space, unused on the tape. If a better head can read a more densly packed datastream, then you could very well make a 250x increase in total capacity.

      It's been a long time since I worked with tape drive technology, so this is just an approximate explanation, of course.
  • They aren't preparing it. They're more than two orders of magnitude, and well over five years away. This is another typical /. "someday we might make a product you want" article. ("Animated holographic XXX playing cards running Linux on Crusoe? Save your allowance kiddies!!!")

    From TFA: "researchers say they expect to one day build cartridges that can store as much as 100T bytes of data."

    One day?

    "in order to store more than the 1T byte of data that IBM is planning for its next-generation products"

    "he sai
    • Pshaaah... I say. Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 100GB tape in my pocket.
      And I thought you were just pleased to see me...
    • 99.9% of these will be used by corporation and governmant agencies.

    • Tapes have never been a consumer item. They are slow (well, not too bad, but in terms of read/write speed vs. capacity). They are also hobbled by the fact that they are a linear media, and reading or writing any one thing to a tape take forever. As such, 99.9% of tapes are used by businesses to store their data, which for the most part is not pirated copyrighted material.

    • Re:It's about time (Score:5, Interesting)

      by GeekDork (194851) on Sunday December 26 2004, @01:49PM (#11185801) Homepage

      It'd be about time for the tape drives and media to become affordable. Capacity isn't really a problem for normal end-users. What's lacking is drives in the 40-80GB range (DAT anyone?) that don't cost an arm and a leg. Tapes are available in sizes that should even be enough for smaller publishing offices.

      If you need to backup >100GB on tape for personal use, you most likely have a serious legal problem or a porn collection that I'd want to see (the collection, not the problem).

        • If you need to backup >100GB on tape for personal use, you most likely have a serious legal problem

          Yes? I've compressed all my legally bought DVDs and CDs on two 250 GB hard drives.

          So you're unlikely. The question however is, whether those movies really are vital data that needs to be backed up in case a big rock hits earth. Sure, it is convenient to back your media library up, but it's not really necessary. And there are 160GB S-DLT drives on the market for you to buy, all you need to do is a spl

          • Of course, the drives are a bit expensive at 10k+ Euro, but as far as availability goes, it's not an issue.

            You can buy a 400 GB (native) LTO-2 drive for well under half of that. Still not in the range of most people though. On eBay, they are available for ~$1800.
    • Yeah ... and I've found that it's really, really hard to get them to understand why it isn't. "But it's making a copy of everything I save!" I try to point out that "Yes, it is! INCLUDING that trojan you just installed and all the files it just are erased are now gone from BOTH drives!" Argghh. But usually it is after they themselves nuke something important and want to know how to restore it from their "backup" do they finally understand. So far as I'm concerned, a backup isn't a backup until you remove
    • It's funny to watch people hit by viruses lose everything because they have an external drive to back up to, but never unplug it.

      For backups to be archival in nature, it's fundamentally important for them to be off-line when you're not backing up. It's also preferrable to send them off-site, but for the home user, off-line should be the biggest step in incremental value.
    • http://www.research.ibm.com/journal/rd/474/jaquett e.html

      Oh, I think they're headed in the right direction. It is neither fragile nor old technology. It's quite refined and well documented, (just in case).

      Tapes are convienent media for backup purposes, even today. Balance cost with reliability... you want predicatble access pattern, simple drive mechanism, lots of magnetic surface area...

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