to the sensitivity of the material
being stored. You need to know
that the storage site for your data
will meet compliance requirements, and your auditors must be
able to confirm this. The storage
provider must be willing to have
auditors appear on-site and see
for themselves where your stuff is
being stored, and confirm that it’s
safe and that the physical security
standards are up to snuff.
In some cases, you must be able
to prove that your data isn’t being
transmitted or stored outside specific political jurisdictions. For
example, sensitive data from European customers must reside in
servers that are in Europe and
must not travel outside Europe
on the way to being stored. Likewise, some types of data in the
United States must reside in and
be transmitted only in the United
States.
Perhaps most importantly, you
have to make sure your organization is ready for the cloud. You
need enough bandwidth to handle
storage, you need to know what
you have to store and how much
of it there is, and you need to
know what level of performance
you require. ´
Contributing Analyst Wayne Rash
can be reached at wayne.rash@ziffda-
visenterprise.com.
STORAGE FROM PAGE 15
Magnetic tape gets boost
By R. Colin Johnson
IBM Research and Fujifilm set a new world record in magnetic tape density—nearly 30G bits per square inch—which they say will keep magnetic
tape alive for another decade.
Magnetic tape might seem old-fashioned, but
after a long career it still is a billion-dollar market
because it offers higher storage densities, costs
less and has a greener footprint, according to IBM
Research (Zurich).
“Magnetic tape, which is the greenest storage
technology available today, is alive and will continue
to be a cost-effective alternative to other storage
technologies for at least another decade,” said IBM
Fellow Evangelos Eleftheriou in a video (http://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=z2w-pzMjpx0). “Achieving
29.6G bits per square inch means that a single car-
tridge 10 by 10 by 2 centimeters in size will hold up
to 35 terabytes of uncompressed data.”
The low, one-penny-per-gigabyte price of IBM and
Fujifilm’s latest tape formulation will likely keep
magnetic tape cost-effective until denser optical
disks are developed. Today’s densest optical disks
are Blu-ray, which stores just 50GB. Storing the
equivalent of one 4-inch tape cartridge holding 35TB
( 35,000GB) would require 700 Blu-ray disks at about
30 cents per gigabyte.
Alternately, storing that much data on hard disk
drives, which hold about a terabyte each, would
require 35 drives at about 10 cents per gigabyte.
Cloud computers and data centers mostly use HDDs
today because they offer instant access to any datum,
but HDDs do not offer tape’s removable media for
archiving multiple backup sets. Tape also has a
“green” advantage over HDDs, especially for data
that is seldom accessed, such as historic archives and
documents maintained for regulatory compliance.
“If you take a tape-based library and compare it
to a similar HDD-based library, it typically takes
200 times more power than the tape system and,
similarly, has a much larger carbon footprint,” said
Mark Lantz, an IBM Research staff member. “And
the reason for that is that tape is a removable media
where one or two tape drives can serve as a library for
thousands of tapes, and all of the tapes that are not
being accessed do not consume any power. Whereas
in disk-based systems, the disks are for reliability
reasons always spinning and consuming power.”
IBM aims to further increase the density of its
tape formulation to 100G bits per square inch in
anticipation of massive storage needs for recorded
video from the millions of surveillance cameras now
recording traffic patterns, the food supply chain,
health records and financial transactions. ´
