Reborn and Reimagined: Don't Write Off Tape Just Yet
Ransomware attacks and data breaches dominate the headlines, but is your data protection strategy truly secure? This must-listen episode dives deep on an unsung hero of cyber resilience - tape.
Tape may have been written off by some as a legacy technology, yet it offers unparalleled air gap protection that no hacker can penetrate. Top experts from Fujifilm and IBM (sponsors of this episode) reveal the major advances that make modern tape more scalable, reliable, and cost-effective than ever before.
Learn how the pioneering capabilities of the newest LTO-9 drives and 50TB tape cartridges can economically safeguard tens or hundreds of petabytes. Hear the shocking sustainability advantage, with tape generating 97% less CO2 emissions and using drastically less power than comparable disk solutions.
With powerful integrated encryption, quantum-safe algorithms on the horizon, and clever optimizations to tame growing data volumes, tape has been reborn as the undisputed information lifeline every organization needs. Don't let your backups remain exposed - get the insider intel on fortifying your last line of defense with tried and tested tape.
Stories referenced in the episode:
https://blocksandfiles.com/2023/11/03/backblaze-shard-stash-cache/
https://blocksandfiles.com/2023/11/06/cohesity-smartfiles-becomes-snowflake-analytics-playground/
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Did you know that backup tape is experienced a resurgence in demand?
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And it's for a reason, I never even contemplated.
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When I was using it in the data center over 30 years ago.
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On last week's episode, I talked about how I created a real air gap back
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then using tape and iron mountain.
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This is a gap that even the best ransomware cannot penetrate.
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And that's why tape is getting a second wind.
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And this episode, we talked to two experts from IBM and Fujifilm who are
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sponsoring this episode and they help us understand what makes tapes so special.
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It's fast.
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Immutable holds data reliably far longer than discount.
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And it costs less.
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I've been a fan of tape since I cut my teeth on it in the early nineties.
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And I'm excited to hear this news.
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I'm Debbie Curtis precedent, AKA Mr.
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Backup, and this podcast turns unappreciated backup admins
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and to cyber recovery heroes.
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This is the backup wrap-up.
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Hi, and welcome to the backup wrap up.
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I'm your host w Curtis Preston, and I have with me the guy that should have told me
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that I hadn't pressed record last time.
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Prasanna Malaiyandi
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I know, I know.
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It seems like this is like our first podcast episode.
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You know that we don't know anything.
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Yeah, luckily, you know, we record the news separate from
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the, the main part of the podcast.
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Luckily it was just a news segment, so we just, we talked for about 10
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minutes and then I went to end the recording and I'm like, um, persona.
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Well, and the funny thing is I was like, huh, I wonder how long this episode is.
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And I tried finding the, 'cause there's normally elapsed time that it shows.
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And I was like, huh, that's interesting.
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I don't see it.
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Maybe they moved JT ui.
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You know how these SaaS products are, they're always changing things around.
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They are indeed.
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It is time for the news of the week.
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So our first story, uh, you know, interesting headline,
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Backblaze Blitzes, cloud Storage Speeds with Shard Stash Cache.
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that's a mouthful.
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What does it mean, Curtis?
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First off you have to talk about Backblaze.
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Backblaze is both a backup vendor and a storage vendor.
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They have a product that competes with, uh, AWS S3, and this is
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specifically talking about that product.
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They call it B two.
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They write the incoming data to hard drives, but at the same time,
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they're also writing it to SSDs.
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And because the way they're uploading the data is a piece at a time, a
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common term that we use in that world is shard for that, uh, piece of data.
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And so they're calling it a shard stash.
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Otherwise known as a cache.
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Um, and they're comparing it, uh, and saying that it's significantly
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faster than uploading to S three as a
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result.
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What they're doing is writing in parallel to both the SSD and the hard drive.
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Once it hits the SSD, then they could reply back to the client, which
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helps with latency, which is where you see a lot of the performance
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improvements, and especially when you start to talk about small files.
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This is where it makes a significant improvement in performance.
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I think they quoted sort of 30% better latency than.
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Normal S three because they're able to accept the right immediately and then
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acknowledge the client, which will then send the next piece, versus having to
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wait for it to commit to, uh, hard drives, which might take a little bit of time.
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Remember, it's not just writing to one hard drive.
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They're writing across multiple hard drives, across multiple
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systems for redundancy purposes.
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So to make sure everything's okay, they need to wait for all those
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commits to come back, which takes time.
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I think they say it needs to hit 19 out of 20 hard disk.
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And so that could take time
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versus writing to SSD, acknowledging.
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And then once it does make it to hard drive, then you can remove it
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from the SSD because it has been persisted in its final location.
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It just seems odd to write it to both places at the same time rather than to
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just write through one to the other.
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But that is what they're doing.
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And any other advantages that you can think of
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for doing this?
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Remember, backup data sets are typically a bunch of small file rights, right?
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You're not gonna be sending a single 10 gig file, right?
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Even though you might be sending it in smaller chunks.
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And so this is where it could help with the performance.
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Yeah.
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They did a test specifically with Veeam backup, and they backed up a
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terabyte of VMs with 256 K block sizes.
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They're saying with S three, it took three hours of 12 minutes.
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With, uh, B two, it took two hours and 15 minutes so that,
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you know, that's 40% faster.
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Our second story
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Is about Cohesity.
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Um, so they have introduced a new integration that allows, uh,
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Cohesity Smart Files to become Snowflake Analytics playground.
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And so really what it is, is Snowflake.
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You have a bunch of data that has been stored there.
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It could be backup data, but Cohesity give you secondary NASS capabilities.
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Where you can now just export a mountain point and store your data there.
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And now with this integration, what it allows is, instead of having to copy the
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data out and into Snowflake, in order to be able to process and do that and move
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the data out, they now allow Snowflake to run their analytics against the
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data that's already stored in Cohesity.
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So saving you that copy operation, the movement operation, and
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allows you to run it locally.
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I don't know a ton about Snowflake, but basically it sounds like
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they're, they're allowing full support for Snowflake within their.
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World, which, um, what it does is it increases the, the perceived value of that
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product within a particular environment, if that customer is a Snowflake user.
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The other thing is that it's not just Cohesity running on premises, but if
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you have a Cohesity instance that's running smart files in the cloud, you can
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also connect directly to that as well.
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And if you have Snowflake running in the cloud, you could pull the data from there
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or access the data from there directly.
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Well, that's the news of the week.
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This episode is sponsored by IBM and Fujifilm.
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Our first guest is Rich, who works for Fujifilm Recording Media, USA,
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and has been in marketing of tape storage for some 30 years now.
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Rich writes a blog called Fujifilm Insights that could
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be found@fujifilmusa.com.
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Welcome to the podcast Rich Gadomski.
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Hey, thanks very much Curtis.
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Prasanna, great to be here again.
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Thanks for having me.
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Glad to have you.
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Our next guest is a tape evangelist who's been ensuring the preservation
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of the world's digital history.
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Welcome to the podcast, Shawn Brume.
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Thank you very much.
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It's a great honor to be here.
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Well, we're glad to have both of you.
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This is actually our first official sponsored episode, so we're very excited
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to have two friends of the pod on.
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How are things in the tape world these days?
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Shawn, take it away.
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Well, I, you know, tape, tape is having really a great big resurgence in the
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technology market, and we say resurgence.
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It's never really gone away.
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It's.
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Into the enterprise, but it more and more people are looking at
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things like cyber resiliency and saying, how do I protect data?
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How do I really air gap it?
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And tape is fundamentally at its core air gap, cyber resilient.
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Yeah, you know, uh, Prasanna, you remember, I think it was just last
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week, wasn't it, that we recorded an episode where we talked about the,
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basically what I'm now calling old school air gap or, or actual air gap,
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Yeah, I remember that.
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Versus a virtual air gap or.
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exactly.
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Because everybody's using the term air gap now, and, and we recorded this
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episode where we basically said, uh, you know, this is about cybersecurity.
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I, I remember, I.
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Back in the day, we weren't really thinking so much about cybersecurity.
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We were just thinking, let's get a copy of these backups far away from
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the thing that we're backing up.
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Right?
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Let's put it in a box, hand it to a man in a van, and then it would show
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up somewhere else and then magically reappear back in a few weeks, and
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then we could recycle those tapes.
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We were mainly thinking about.
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You know, just, you know, getting a gap of air in order to protect it from a
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fire or a flood or something like that.
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But nowadays, uh, it, it sounds like the, you know, the, one of the primary
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reasons people are thinking about tape has to do with cybersecurity.
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What rich does that seem about what you're saying?
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You know, to your point, tape was always, uh, you know, great for DR.
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Applications, backup, DR.
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Obviously archive.
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Uh, and I think the reason for that is because it is so portable, easily
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removable from its environment so you can safely get it offline, offsite.
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Uh, and that's really critical today.
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Uh, you know, more so as you mentioned, it's not just about, you know, hurricanes
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and fires and floods, um, earthquakes.
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You know, it really today the threat is, uh, cyber related.
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Um, so anything that's connected to the network, in our opinion, and I
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think most experts would agree if it's connected to the network, hackers
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can figure out how to access it.
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Um, and, and so when it comes to, to data storage, you know, getting,
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at least mission critical data, offline, offsite, um, is a best
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practice that, you know, a lot of the, um, you know, federal government
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agencies are advocating for today.
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When you look at the FBI, um, CISA, uh, department of Homeland Security,
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um, even to a certain extent.
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Securities and Exchange Commission.
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Uh, it's interesting, you know, what they're talking about now.
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Um, and we can get more into that, but, but definitely tape, you know,
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was always removable, always portable.
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Um, it's gotten better today because of its, you know,
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incredible capacity increase.
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So, just to give you a quick example, um, you know, if you go back 10 years ago
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with LTO-6 to get one petabyte off site would take 160 tapes, 160 cartridges.
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Okay?
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It was only 2.5 terabytes compressed, you know, 6.25, that's how you get the one 60.
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Well, today with LTO nine, you're talking about 23 tapes.
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You're talking about a, a case of tapes to put a petabyte offsite offline.
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So it makes a lot of sense today.
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And of course, it's, you know, very, very cost effective.
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So I know we talked about sort of the air gap, Curtis, and I know on our last
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episode we talked, and Rich, you just mentioned sort of you could take tape and
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you could move it offline, which is great.
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Uh, take it out, move it off site.
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I think one thing though, Curtis, that came up in our conversation
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last week, which I hadn't really thought about, is the process aspect.
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Right.
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Part of it is keeping your data offline, but the other thing is being able to
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build a completely separate process to ensure that that hackers could not
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get to your data even if they tried to.
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So I know the example you gave Curtis was Iron Mountain having
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a separate call in, right.
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Having sort of a mechanism to allow for.
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Data to only come back to be restored or deleted, which is a separate
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exception process that needs to be verified by multiple people.
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All these things, which get a little bit more difficult from a virtual
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air gap solution perspective versus a physical tape where you have the
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flexibility because it's offline.
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Right?
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I can just move those 23 tapes like you were mentioning, rich, right?
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I could just move it from one location to another location.
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Fairly easily, but trying to move all that data physically over a
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network would probably be impossible.
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Plus the controls you need in place from a process perspective.
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Never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck.
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That's right.
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Truck nets.
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Um, you, you bring that up.
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That is such a great point.
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Um, you know.
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That is, I think that's where Rich was going, was that the scale of data
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today, if you start looking at AI applications and, and IOTs that are
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pulling together all this data and it needs to be protected, well, how
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do they one fundamentally protect it?
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Air gap wise?
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What's the process?
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Um, but number two, how do you meet the scale?
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Because as you said, can you imagine taking a petabyte every night and
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just pushing it over the wire, right?
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Just, just to protect it, not to create transaction or anything else,
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but just to preserve that data.
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Um, the other point that comes behind that is how do you establish a second site?
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Easily and effectively, if you've got it coming in to a single site, if IOT's
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collecting from the edge and coming into the data center, how do you propagate it?
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And tape is being used as that air gap orchestration to say,
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Hey, move the data, stream it in.
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And what a lot of people don't realize is, uh, there's always
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talk of, well, tape's slow, right?
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I, I, well,
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You won't hear that here, trust me, Shawn, you won't hear that from this podcast.
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Fundamentally, it's linearly extremely high performance.
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Right?
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And those that deal with it.
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Now, if you're gonna go get little segments, sure.
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So if you're gonna stream that data in, there's nothing that can stream like tape
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as far as efficiency, and then move the truck net, um, take the truck net and move
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that whole, and we talk a petabyte today.
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But a petabyte's a start.
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I mean, usually people are talking about Y ingest.
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You know, a hundred petabytes a year and I need to move 10% or 15%
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of that data on a regular basis.
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Um, so we've seen a lot of orchestration around not only the air gap
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protection, which is multi-layered, but also how do I reestablish a site?
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How do I make it easier to move all that data?
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And tape's great because for portability, it's safe to port your data with it.
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Right there.
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There are a number of workflows that involve.
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F transporting a, you know, a lot of data on a very regular basis,
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and those workflows are very.
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Tape friendly.
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Right.
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I, I think of, I certainly think, I, I live in Southern California, you
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know, right up the road there's a whole bunch of people who make a whole lot of
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stuff on a very regular basis, and that stuff needs to be transported around.
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Tape is very popular when I go to National Association of Broadcasters.
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Right at the NAB show tape is very popular at NAB.
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Shawn you mentioned about the concern.
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It, it's so funny when I'm talking to just random people that, that
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aren't deep within the backup world, I say, I'm, I'm gonna ask
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you a fill in the blank question.
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And I, you know, and I want them to fill in the blank and to say
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the reason that we, that, that the, a lot of the backup world moved.
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You know, from tape to disc, was it because tape was too blank?
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Right?
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And everyone always says slow, right?
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They're like, oh, tape was too slow.
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It's like, no, that was not the problem.
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The problem was we couldn't match the speed of the tape, right?
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So tape is actually really, really fast.
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Um, you know, the, the, the problem that we have is like with
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incremental backups and trying to, you know, make the tape drive happy.
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Uh, that's the challenge that we, that, that became the new challenge.
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But all of those great things about tape, the cost effectiveness, and it's not
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even like, it's not even close, right?
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I, I've done a number of cost comparisons when I look at tape versus disc, even
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disc with deduplication, that even if the disc were free, like even if you
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bought the dis array, uh, for, for a dollar, that the power and cooling to, to.
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To, uh, operate that dis array would be more than the cost of an entire tape-based
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system that you purchased and operated.
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Right.
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So it it, it's not even close from a, from a cost perspective.
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And then let's also talk a little bit about, again, you're, you're, you're
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with Friends of Tape here, right?
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We, we talk a lot about the, um.
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Uh, the bit error rate of tape versus disc and competing technologies.
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Do you want to talk about that a little bit?
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Who wants to talk about that?
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Rich or Shawn?
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Let me, let me hit the TCO point and I'll turn over to bit error rate if you want
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Rich to you or I can handle that as well.
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Um, but little bit about T-C-O-I-I totally agree with you.
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When you talk about the total cost of ownership, you have
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to put everything in there.
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You can't just say, well, you know, I found an HDD at
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Costco that's only 62 bucks.
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Right?
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Um, okay, great.
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But there's a lot that goes along with that.
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Um, and one of the things that gets.
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Gets thrown out is the fact that there's a carbon impact to that, right?
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When you start talking about maintaining that data and spinning that energy,
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there's a serious carbon impact.
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So we totally agree.
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Uh, and I don't run into too many people anymore that say, um, well I
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can do HDD for the same cost unless they have a very small amount of data.
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Right?
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Um, they, they, they're pretty open and, and rich, do you wanna do bit error rate,
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or do you want me to throw in a couple of
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Yeah, I mean, I'll just keep it real simple.
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Uh, with the latest generation of LTO, um, say LTO nine and, uh, the, um,
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TSS 1170, uh, the IBM 35 92 product.
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The bit error rate is expressed as one times 10 to the 20th power.
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So that com, that's several orders of magnitude better, uh,
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than what you have with HDD, uh, and flash, which is typically.
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One times 10 to the 15, 16, or 17th power.
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So what does that mean in terms of, like for our listeners, right?
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If I had X amount of data, I would expect one bit to be flipped.
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How often, like, or based on how much data?
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it, it, yeah, 1, 1, 1 bit in 10 times 10 to the 20th.
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Power.
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That's a lot is 20 zeros.
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So that's, so that's like one bit in every a hundred petabytes
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Ver versus one bit in every a hundred terabytes, I think, or Yeah, a hundred.
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Tera.
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If, if it's three orders of magnitude different, then that would be, and
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that sounds like that's the, the best.
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Right.
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Because if it's 20 versus 17, then if it's one petabyte, then it's, um.
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A hundred terabytes.
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Yeah,
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Right,
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Right?
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Um,
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which is
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which means that you have, you have a bit that is flipped, that is a one instead
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of a zero, and you don't know it, right?
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That, that, that's just it.
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It's the, it's the dirty little secret of magnetic, uh, uh, recording.
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It's the,
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well, not, not just magnetic recording all, all recording, right.
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right, right.
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And that's, you know, it's, it's the.
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And the fundamentals.
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HDD works to counter that with ECC rates.
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And if you were to convert that, like everybody says, well, you
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know, a hundred petabytes, what does it really mean in tapes?
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It means that you would run around the earth 1.5 times almost before you'd hit
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that bid error rate statistically in tape, um, around the center of the earth.
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So that's a, I mean, that is a lot of tape processing before you get there.
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Yeah, and, and we've seen it in practical applications.
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Um, cern uh, had a great story where, um, they did a migration, I think it was
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from, maybe it was TSS 1150 to TSS 1155.
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And they, they transferred a hundred petabytes of data from
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the lower capacity cartridge to the higher capacity cartridge.
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And at the end of that process, they had, I think, three or four gigabytes that
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they couldn't recover, but sent, um, those cartridges to IBM who did recover them.
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So out of a hundred petabytes, they had no data loss.
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Um, so, you know.
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Practically speaking, you don't often see a hundred petabyte migration, but it's,
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it's a great opportunity to really test, you know, the integrity of the system.
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Yeah.
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And, and the other thing that I, that I throw out, if somebody is truly concerned
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about that, they can literally make another copy for, for next to nothing.
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Right?
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That's something you can do in tape, right?
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Because what, what a lot of people don't think about about tape
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versus disc is that with disk . The mechanics and the media are.
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They, they're inseparable, right?
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They're, everything's all inside.
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Whereas with tape, the mechanics and the media are two separate things.
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So the, the, the media has a separate cost element, and so you can have
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a whole separate copy on tape for much less co, uh, price than I.
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Like, you can't even compare that.
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Right?
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And so if you did have one bit error rate on a, an a crucial piece of
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data, if you had a second copy, you wouldn't have that bit in the same spot.
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Right?
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Um, so lemme, let me ask you a question.
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Um, so let's say somebody has, uh, they got on the, the d dupe and disc, uh,
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uh, bandwagon 20 years ago, and, or they're like somebody like Prasanna,
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who's never seen a tape in the wild.
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I've seen a tape.
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I've seen a tape.
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I've never had to use a
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Okay.
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Okay.
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You've, he's never had to use one.
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Right.
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What's happened?
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Or, you know, somebody who maybe, you know, they cut their
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teeth on, on LTL one, right?
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And, uh, you know, and, and they remember the days of like lost leader things and
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all the, you know, those bad, bad days.
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What can they look forward to as what, what's happened to
Speaker:
tape in the last 10 to 20 years?
Speaker:
Advancements.
Speaker:
Yeah, well, I'll, I'll start Shawn.
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I mean, the, the big thing is capacity, and I alluded to it earlier, comparing.
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Say LT oh six to, um, um, LT O nine today.
Speaker:
Uh, but just recently, IBM and Fujifilm announced, um, a new 50 terabyte tape
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cartridge, uh, which is two and a half times, uh, the previous generation of,
Speaker:
uh, of the TSS 11 60 35 92 cartridge.
Speaker:
So I.
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If you look at the compound annual growth rate of capacity growth over
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the last 10 years, the previous 50 years pales in comparison.
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So a lot of the technological advancements, um, I.
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Have been happening in the last 10 to 20 years, more so
Speaker:
than, um, in the earlier days.
Speaker:
So the technological advancements are, are very rapid these days.
Speaker:
Capacity is an excellent example.
Speaker:
Of course, you know, the cartridge mechanics, the durability.
Speaker:
Um, drives and media have been greatly enhanced.
Speaker:
Um, so it's a technology that's not sitting still.
Speaker:
It's, it's not collecting rust.
Speaker:
Uh, it's not, some people say it's not your father's Oldsmobile, and,
Speaker:
and that couldn't be more true.
Speaker:
Um, but, but look, we, we did a 580 terabyte demonstration,
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uh, with the IBM lab at Zurich.
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580 terabytes.
Speaker:
That's native capacity on ALTO size cartridge.
Speaker:
And in fact, the LTO roadmap has now been extended to LTO 14, uh, which
Speaker:
gets very close to that capacity.
Speaker:
576 terabytes native, so you're over 1.4 petabytes with compression.
Speaker:
Um, so the tech, you know, and do we need that kind of capacity?
Speaker:
You know, they're talking about the need to, uh, to protect and preserve
Speaker:
up to 26 zettabytes of persistent data by the end of this decade.
Speaker:
So just one zettabyte is 55,000,018 terabyte hard drives.
Speaker:
55,000,018 terabyte hard drives.
Speaker:
One LT nine, uh, one zettabyte is 55 million LT nine
Speaker:
cartridges at native capacity.
Speaker:
Um, so what's, you know, the, the big picture is data growth is,
Speaker:
is truly, um, uh, with, you know, rampant, uh, it's, it is exponential
Speaker:
is the word I was looking for.
Speaker:
Um, and the, the value of data is increasing.
Speaker:
Uh, by leaps and bounds now that we can apply artificial
Speaker:
intelligence to IT analytics.
Speaker:
So what does that mean?
Speaker:
People wanna keep that data now for longer periods of time.
Speaker:
How do you do that cost effectively?
Speaker:
And you've got a tried and true technology with an incredible ecosystem behind it.
Speaker:
Um, you know, we, we recently put out our tape storage council report.
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You know, there were 25 member companies listed, and that's
Speaker:
probably half of the people you know that could be on that report.
Speaker:
Um, so there's a tremendous ecosystem, you know, the leaps and bounds of automation.
Speaker:
I should let Shawn speak about that.
Speaker:
Um, but technology's not sitting still.
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Rich, you talked about the physical, how much more physically resilient tape
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has become, and especially LTO tape.
Speaker:
So funny little story.
Speaker:
Uh, I made a music video and, and we were parroting Adele's rolling in the deep in
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one shot and, and rolling in the deep.
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She's smashing dishes against the wall.
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And so I wanted to smash LTO tapes against the wall and have them like explode.
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And no matter how hard we hit them against the wall, they wouldn't
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shatter into multiple pieces.
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So the only way we were able to get it to work was to physically disassemble
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them, take out all the screws, and then, and then tape them back together
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with, with, with scotch tape so that when we would throw 'em at the wall,
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they would, they would fly apart.
Speaker:
Anyway, I just thought you would, you would find that amusing.
Speaker:
that's very funny.
Speaker:
Uh, but you know, what we find is the, the durability of the cartridges
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far exceed the actual usage.
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Typically.
Speaker:
Uh, I mean there's, there's very few environments around the world that, um, I.
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You know, really exceed any, any of the specifications.
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Um, so, uh, you know, that really durability is, is excellent.
Speaker:
I mean, we measure defective parts, parts per million.
Speaker:
You know, that's, it's just almost negligible, almost zero.
Speaker:
But Shawn, talk about encryption.
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Yeah.
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Um, I, I think encryption goes into what's been happening with.
Speaker:
Over the last 20 years, um, believe it or not, from a hardware point of view
Speaker:
in storage tape, really led the industry into that in 2005 six timeframe, uh,
Speaker:
introducing AES 2 56, really kicking it up with key management because key
Speaker:
lifecycle management was so important.
Speaker:
It's embedded in the drive.
Speaker:
A certificate in the drive to support synchronous and
Speaker:
asynchronous, uh, encryption.
Speaker:
And the encryption itself is AES 2 56 up till today, which is still quantum safe.
Speaker:
Um, as far as Grover's algorithm goes.
Speaker:
Uh, and the latest tape drive TSS 1170.
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It is prepped.
Speaker:
For when NIST finally ratifies the, um, latest and I see everybody's, you
Speaker:
know, we're laughing a little bit, but when NIST finally ratifies the,
Speaker:
the latest algorithms we're ready to put those certificates in there
Speaker:
and get it fully quantum secure.
Speaker:
Um, but.
Speaker:
On top of that, we've done a lot of stuff in the tape drive.
Speaker:
It's that people don't readily grasp onto as a very innovative technology.
Speaker:
And, and coming from the backup wrap, wrap up, this is really important.
Speaker:
Um, you know, we were talking about incremental backups and
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the, these little chunks of.
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Files or, or data that are out there.
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Um, back in, I circa call it two thousand five thousand six, we started
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a program inside the drive that does what we call back hitch list flush.
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And essentially it says, Hey, if you come to me and you've got a bunch of files,
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you're reading an order and you read.
Speaker:
The stop of the file rather than backing up and starting the new file
Speaker:
and then just, you know, this real slow process, we're just gonna process it.
Speaker:
So inside the process of the tape drive, we just stream down and meet
Speaker:
the effectiveness of the tape drive.
Speaker:
And then we said, well, let's make it one better.
Speaker:
Um, and we introduced in 2015, uh, the ability to say, Hey, I'm gonna pull back
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these 1000 files or assets or data chunks, um, and they're all over this tape.
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You drive, tell me the order.
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I need to go get them in and then tell me that's what you're gonna do.
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And I'll tell you, go get 'em.
Speaker:
And it is proven to reduce the cycle time between 60 and 83%.
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Mm.
Speaker:
At the max, depending on, you know, what, what your, your distance, et
Speaker:
cetera is, which goes back to is tape being innovative every single day?
Speaker:
It's driving into that.
Speaker:
So we're, we're again, leading encryption.
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Um, some of the individuals who do encryption in the tape
Speaker:
drive are the individuals who have led the latest NIST push.
Speaker:
As you may or may not know, IBM's.
Speaker:
What introduced its algorithms and they're still part of the, the last round, and I
Speaker:
guess they're going in round four now, uh, at NIST to get those algorithms approved.
Speaker:
So, uh, tape is really heavily engaged and we tell people,
Speaker:
don't put your data on a tape.
Speaker:
Anything for that matter at rest without encryption, there's no reason.
Speaker:
There's no reason there's no penalty.
Speaker:
Literally no penalty for using encryption except for no one can
Speaker:
ever access your data illegally.
Speaker:
Yeah.
Speaker:
Like you said, Shawn, it's like, yeah, you better make sure you have,
Speaker:
uh, encryption turn on because.
Speaker:
Like you said, those might leave your physical presence.
Speaker:
Those are easy to find, right?
Speaker:
Things happen.
Speaker:
You wanna make sure that your data is safe, and being able to offload
Speaker:
that encryption to the tape drive itself to ensure every single piece
Speaker:
of data gets encrypted regardless of what the client is that's
Speaker:
writing to the tape, I think ensures standardization across the board rather
Speaker:
than ensuring that an admin did not.
Speaker:
Or did check the box that said, enable an encryption right at the
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backup software level, which we know mistakes always happen, right?
Speaker:
People get busy, they're not able to always find the right
Speaker:
check boxes and settings.
Speaker:
So having that on by default makes a lot of sense.
Speaker:
I was gonna ask you a question though, Shawn.
Speaker:
I know you were talking about the technology to sort of
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put things in order, right?
Speaker:
The drive puts the files in order that need to be read back.
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Before I started on this podcast and talking to Curtis and learning
Speaker:
from the experts like yourselves about tape, I would always think
Speaker:
that tape was typically used for sort of full restore cases, right?
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Hey, I had a site blow up.
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I need to recover this entire application.
Speaker:
Or I have, uh, a table that got dropped.
Speaker:
I need to go back three weeks and restore the entire database.
Speaker:
But are you starting to see it more and more common, especially in cyber?
Speaker:
Instances where it is really more of that file level restore
Speaker:
capabilities or a subset of backups that need to come back from tape.
Speaker:
You know, in the cyber world, we see that it's actually more of a stream, the
Speaker:
whole thing out because they're trying to figure out what's happened to their
Speaker:
data and they wanna get it back, um, but they're going to selectively choose it.
Speaker:
What we are seeing is an enormous growth in active slash archive use.
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In other words, I have these.
Speaker:
Files and they're active and then they move semi-active
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and I need two copies anyways.
Speaker:
I'm just gonna make my primary data back it all up, push it right to tape,
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and I've got a second copy on there.
Speaker:
And then when I say, Hey look, it's not being touched anymore.
Speaker:
I'm gonna get rid of it.
Speaker:
In that instance, all of a sudden what happens is.
Speaker:
All these requests because no matter how we would like to say, we're never
Speaker:
gonna look at our PowerPoints from five years ago, somebody's gonna come
Speaker:
back and say, I did a great PowerPoint five years ago and I want that back.
Speaker:
And they'll now start pulling those forward.
Speaker:
But it's also being used in the.
Speaker:
Um, application of, I need two or three copies because it's my service
Speaker:
business to provide protection of data, and they are just massive.
Speaker:
Massive multi-tenancy environments to go get this data so they're not
Speaker:
being requested by one organization.
Speaker:
They're being requested by a hundred or a thousand organizations.
Speaker:
And that leads to the need for, for, you know, random access ordering.
Speaker:
That's what we call it in the tape, which comes back and says, oh yeah, we've got.
Speaker:
1200 requests and we're gonna cut the time to get 'em back by 83%.
Speaker:
Go, go, go.
Speaker:
Yep.
Speaker:
So we are seeing a big shift from it cyber's, as you guys know, 3, 2,
Speaker:
1, and one is now 3, 2, 1, and one with a zero because nothing can be
Speaker:
lost and, and we're seeing more and more of that application coming into.
Speaker:
The active archive realm where clients need their data, they need
Speaker:
multiple copies, and it comes right back to sustainability and cost.
Speaker:
How much do I wanna pay for the second and third copies?
Speaker:
Because if the first one truly goes away, I probably have a bigger problem and a
Speaker:
little bit of time to get to that data is
Speaker:
It's okay.
Speaker:
Exactly.
Speaker:
At least I have access to it rather than it's gone completely.
Speaker:
that's right.
Speaker:
Exactly.
Speaker:
Um, Shawn, you, uh, you, you talked a little bit about
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the, the active archive thing.
Speaker:
Um, and so, uh, one of the things that, that I thought also we could
Speaker:
talk, you know, this, this active archive idea I know is another area
Speaker:
where tape is doing really well.
Speaker:
Again, for that person, I, I'll just say again, if we take the average.
Speaker:
You know it, person on the street.
Speaker:
Um, the, the idea of tape.
Speaker:
As a place to put data for a very long period of time.
Speaker:
Seems really weird.
Speaker:
They're like, they're thinking, oh, hard, hard disc.
Speaker:
I like hard.
Speaker:
Right?
Speaker:
Or, or solid, solid state.
Speaker:
That sounds really solid.
Speaker:
So what, what I'm curious about, uh, rich here.
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Is I, I'd love to hear about, uh, and of course, I know I already know
Speaker:
the answers to this, to this question that I'm asking, but Rich, like what
Speaker:
have we done with the media itself in the past however many years?
Speaker:
with The most recent 50 terabyte cartridge from IBM.
Speaker:
We're using a new substrate, uh, called Aramid.
Speaker:
I.
Speaker:
Uh, which is thinner and much stronger.
Speaker:
We actually are using a, a mix of, um, barium ferri, which is kind
Speaker:
of the current defacto standard with NextGen strontium ferri.
Speaker:
Magnetic particle.
Speaker:
Um, but, uh, I wanna just say thanks for mentioning Active Archive Shawn.
Speaker:
Um, you know, that's close to my heart.
Speaker:
Uh, it's a great application for it.
Speaker:
It really, you know, archive has become a four letter word.
Speaker:
I know this is a backup cybersecurity, but the nice thing about an active archive
Speaker:
environment is you can easily export.
Speaker:
I.
Speaker:
A copy of, uh, of the tapes for cybersecurity air gap purposes.
Speaker:
But nobody wants to archive, uh, people want, um, 24 7
Speaker:
access to their, to their data.
Speaker:
Uh, so an active archive allows you to do that cost-effectively.
Speaker:
Um, and it isn't frequently accessed data, so you don't wanna keep it on, on
Speaker:
spinning disc, um, or on solid state, which are, by the way, great technologies.
Speaker:
You know, we need a ton of solid state, we need a ton of disc.
Speaker:
We need a ton of tape too, uh, because that's what it's gonna
Speaker:
take to really properly protect data and preserve it long term.
Speaker:
Um, but the other thing Shawn said was sustainability.
Speaker:
Um, sustainability has become a huge issue.
Speaker:
I.
Speaker:
And it transcends every application, uh, throughout the entire organization,
Speaker:
um, including cybersecurity, uh, and, and data protection.
Speaker:
So, um, you know, tape consumes 87% less energy than disc.
Speaker:
Studies show that it produces 97% less CO two E.
Speaker:
And, you know, we were joking at the beginning of the show
Speaker:
prior to recording that.
Speaker:
Yeah.
Speaker:
Here I am bundled up because it's freezing cold in New Jersey, but at the end of
Speaker:
this week it's gonna be 80 degrees.
Speaker:
Um, so it's hard to deny, um, climate change, global warming.
Speaker:
I mean, we see evidence of it every single day.
Speaker:
And Shawn can speak to this, uh, every single RFQ he gets today for storage.
Speaker:
Uh, they wanna know what is the sustainability impact.
Speaker:
Let Shawn talk to that.
Speaker:
if I could add to, to riches to relate for the, the listener.
Speaker:
What, you know, you're talking about trophe or it's an aramid.
Speaker:
What does that really mean?
Speaker:
Um, the, the benefits long term of, of substrates like aramid are.
Speaker:
Think about a, a giant sailboat sail.
Speaker:
The, you know, the main sail that really pulls a lot of drag aramid is
Speaker:
used in those strands of aramid because they're strong, they're, uh, water
Speaker:
resistant, they're sun resistant, and that's what's being used in that tape
Speaker:
to preserve the longevity of data.
Speaker:
So from a relatable point of view.
Speaker:
You know, amid and these other technologies in tape is very advanced.
Speaker:
We just don't talk about them 'cause they're kind of under the covers.
Speaker:
It's like, so you're putting sailboat cells in your tape.
Speaker:
Uh, you, I really don't care.
Speaker:
I just want my data to be there.
Speaker:
Right?
Speaker:
So.
Speaker:
I think, I think the, the reason why I wanted to mention it, just sort of the,
Speaker:
the overall, um, you know, when we talk about tape versus disc, especially when
Speaker:
we talk about long-term storage, right?
Speaker:
That, that the thing that people, I think the average person doesn't understand
Speaker:
is just how much cheaper tape is just how much better it is at writing
Speaker:
ones and zeros than any other medium.
Speaker:
And then also really importantly, is how good it is at holding onto those ones
Speaker:
and zeros for a really long period of time without any power applied to it.
Speaker:
Right?
Speaker:
Um, and, and so, and, and some of those advancements came from those substrate.
Speaker:
Changes, right.
Speaker:
So the, the change to barium, Ferri was a big one.
Speaker:
That also, as I recall, that had a big capacity change.
Speaker:
'cause you could, you could do different things with the, with the
Speaker:
bits and, and put them closer together.
Speaker:
Um, and what's really sort of funny to me is as, as we've done changes over the
Speaker:
years with tape and, and the bits have gotten closer and closer together on,
Speaker:
on, on the media, they're nowhere near.
Speaker:
Uh, it's like a astronomical difference between how close they are together
Speaker:
on disc, which is why there's such a big difference as to how well it
Speaker:
can hold onto those ones and zeros.
Speaker:
But anyway, I preach, sorry.
Speaker:
Um,
Speaker:
it is a good point.
Speaker:
But it is a good point though, because I think a lot of people do get confused
Speaker:
and they do think, Hey, I can use an SSD for my backup or for my archives, right?
Speaker:
And it's like, please don't, I know everyone's space.
Speaker:
don't do that.
Speaker:
But some people do that, right?
Speaker:
They're like, Hey, let me just use this.
Speaker:
'cause it's cheap, it's reasonable, it has high performance, but they don't
Speaker:
understand that durability aspect
Speaker:
Yeah.
Speaker:
Or the cost or the energy involved in that.
Speaker:
Yeah.
Speaker:
It's just, it just gives me the heebie-jeebies.
Speaker:
When you talk about doing archives on SSDs, like who, like what, why do you
Speaker:
need first off, you know, sorry, sorry.
Speaker:
So what's, what tape is really good is holding data for a
Speaker:
really long period of time.
Speaker:
That's like the best thing it could do for next to nothing from a cost perspective.
Speaker:
What, what a, what a SSD is really good at is really fast random
Speaker:
access, like really, really fast.
Speaker:
Why do you need that with a file that you haven't looked at in 17 years?
Speaker:
That's all.
Speaker:
That's all
Speaker:
Yeah, because when you do look at it in 17 years, you want it to be instantaneous.
Speaker:
Curtis, come on.
Speaker:
Yeah.
Speaker:
Goodness gracious.
Speaker:
Instantaneous.
Speaker:
That's absolutely
Speaker:
true.
Speaker:
Shawn, I know you've mentioned a couple times about sustainability,
Speaker:
and I know Rich, you were joking about climate change and how it's supposed
Speaker:
to be 80 degrees in New Jersey.
Speaker:
Could you guys talk a little bit more about what makes tape so great
Speaker:
from a sustainability perspective versus the other technologies out
Speaker:
there and why it really matters?
Speaker:
Prasanna.
Speaker:
Carbon impact.
Speaker:
I don't like to use sustainability 'cause it has so many, so many
Speaker:
offerings, but it is sustainability.
Speaker:
The carbon impact of it is huge as we know.
Speaker:
It consumes, you know, it data centers consume like 3% of the
Speaker:
world's energy all by themselves.
Speaker:
Um, but.
Speaker:
For tape, what it comes down to is, why is it so much better?
Speaker:
Well, to begin with, it's fundamentally offline.
Speaker:
The data as stored requires no energy to live for 30 years.
Speaker:
That contributes.
Speaker:
But then you come back to the way the operation is, each tape drive, and, and
Speaker:
let's say you've got 10, you've got 20.
Speaker:
Whatever it is, is only around.
Speaker:
Let's just average it out at 42 watts.
Speaker:
So the average tape infrastructure with 50 petabytes of tape is running, give or
Speaker:
take, right around 1.4 kilowatt hours.
Speaker:
Um, whereas.
Speaker:
nothing.
Speaker:
Which, which is almost nothing, right?
Speaker:
That's like, uh, what two refrigerators running, um, in your household and
Speaker:
50 petabytes on HDD just in energy is running 97% more than that.
Speaker:
That's just a huge amount.
Speaker:
So you're talking about rather than 3,800 kilowatt hours a year with tape,
Speaker:
you're like 28,000 kilowatt hours on HDD.
Speaker:
for the HDD, you're just talking about the power, right?
Speaker:
Not including the cooling and other aspects yet either.
Speaker:
Just the energy that's before the thermal effect.
Speaker:
So you throw a thermal effect in there and all of a sudden, by
Speaker:
the way, tape has a charge for thermal because one at disadvantage
Speaker:
of tape is you do have to keep.
Speaker:
The environment regulated.
Speaker:
You can't run at 106 Fahrenheit 40 C, right?
Speaker:
If you do it, it, it's just very difficult to, uh, hard on the tape.
Speaker:
But most environments, humans can't operate in that anyways, very well.
Speaker:
It doesn't happen it on the other sustainability aspects.
Speaker:
Come what, what Curtis had talked about the longevity of it.
Speaker:
Most people don't realize that the average tape library for an
Speaker:
enterprise a big, you know, we're talking big where scale matters.
Speaker:
Um, last 16.4 years in the field, which would basically be like getting out a one
Speaker:
terabyte drive from 2003 today and saying.
Speaker:
Yeah, we're good to go.
Speaker:
Every, we're gonna put our data on it.
Speaker:
Um, so less migrations means less waste, less e-waste because 98.9%
Speaker:
of the entire tape infrastructure has a recyclable component to it.
Speaker:
It may not be super easy, you know, it may not be just let it rot, but
Speaker:
it's recyclable into some sort of.
Speaker:
Capability.
Speaker:
So that just overall starts to look at data and say, well, if you're gonna do
Speaker:
a third copy, I don't need it right now.
Speaker:
I really shouldn't need it right now.
Speaker:
I can, number one, the, it's something like 68% of CEOs are now
Speaker:
being graded on sustainability.
Speaker:
Sustainability as in their carbon impact change.
Speaker:
And in Europe it's.
Speaker:
I, if you're over a certain size, you have to report your carbon impact.
Speaker:
Um, so it's now up into the C-suite.
Speaker:
So your three Ps matter people performance profits, uh, with profits being last.
Speaker:
So it, they're gonna have to start focusing on things like carbon impacts.
Speaker:
And we've got lots of data that just demonstrates that at every level from.
Speaker:
Embedded to operational to end of life cycle tape is much
Speaker:
better for retaining that data.
Speaker:
Yeah.
Speaker:
So speaking of the, um, c-suite, uh, you know, and, and, and what they're
Speaker:
concerned with, not only sustainability, but bringing it back to cybersecurity,
Speaker:
um, you know, the SEC is now looking for, um, cybersecurity disclosures.
Speaker:
They are holding the, uh, the board members accountable, uh, for their
Speaker:
cybersecurity, uh, preparedness, resilience, what have you.
Speaker:
Um, so the, and the investors are looking at that.
Speaker:
We'll start looking at that standardized, um, disclosure forms,
Speaker:
uh, you know, to make a judgment on the company's preparedness.
Speaker:
And, you know.
Speaker:
When you look at the cost of taking a petabyte and moving it offsite
Speaker:
into an air gap compared to what companies are paying today in
Speaker:
ransomware, it's a drop in a bucket.
Speaker:
So, it's the last line of defense for sure.
Speaker:
There's a lot of things up front you have to do to keep the hackers out,
Speaker:
and all those things need to be done, but it is a multifaceted approach.
Speaker:
Uh, and I think it's a great insurance policy, uh, you know, to get some of that
Speaker:
mission critical data offsite, air gapped.
Speaker:
Uh, and, and the boards of these companies are gonna be held
Speaker:
personally accountable for it.
Speaker:
So hopefully they'll, they'll start, uh, you know, really approving the
Speaker:
budgets to, um, to go that extra mile.
Speaker:
Uh, you know, the other thing is if you wanna get cyber insurance, uh, you
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know, the first thing a cyber insurance, uh, underwriter is gonna wanna know.
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Are you putting your data offsite, offline at the very first?
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Because they're not gonna give you a policy unless you're
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following best practices.
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So, you know, I think that, you know, final comment, you know, putting some
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data on tape, getting it air gapped, uh, you know, is definitely a best practice
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today recommended by the government.
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SEC wants it, cyber insurance companies want it, so let's do it.
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Absolutely
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So for, people who may not be familiar with tape or other things like that, or
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want to learn more, what can they do?
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Like, where can they go?
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Yeah.
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I mean, Fujifilm's got a, a, you know, wealth of information on its own websites.
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Um, simply Google anything about tape, you'll find it.
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Um, linear tape open.org.
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IBM is a treasure trove of information, uh, tape Storage
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Council, active Arch Archive Alliance.
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There's no shortage of information.
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Um, it's just people need to.
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Um, raise their awareness and take the effort to learn about today's
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modern, highly advanced tape.
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I'd say stay off YouTube for the
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most part.
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YouTubers love to go back and go, oh, I've got this terrible thing.
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Tape sucks.
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Well, well if you're running one from 1972 and it's real to real and it fails on you.
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Yeah, that happens on occasion.
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Um, but
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Wait a second.
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We, we've got a great video of Shawn on YouTube from our summit meeting
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talking about sustainability of tape.
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So go to Fuji Film recording me USA, YouTube and look for Shawn Brummet.
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He is got a great number of videos.
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Another one if, if if you have propeller heads.
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We're all propeller heads on this call.
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Um, uh, in ssic.org, INSI c.org goes down to the, the nitty gritty of
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storage technologies on their site.
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It's a great place to get down into it.
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Okay.
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Awesome.
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Well, that's great.
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I wanna thank you guys for, for coming on and talking.
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Thanks, rich,
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Thank you very much, Curtis.
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Thanks Prasanna.
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Thanks, Shawn.
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Pleasure to be here today.
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and thank you, Shawn.
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Well, thank you very much.
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It was, uh, entertaining.
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All right, and Prasanna, of course, as always, thanks
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for, thanks for being a great
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I try.
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I try.
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It was great to meet you, Shawn, and great seeing you again, rich.
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Thanks.
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Thanks again.
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and I want to thank our listeners.
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Of course, we would be nothing without you.
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That is a wrap.
Rich Gadomski
Head of Tape Evangelism
Rich works for FUJIFILM Recording Media USA and has been in marketing of tape storage for some 30 years now. Rich writes a blog called FUJIFILM Insights that can be found at fujifilmusa.com.
Shawn Brume, Sc.D.
Tape Evangelist and Strategist
A 30-year career working with technology as a developer, implementor, user and market influencer has provided Shawn with a unique breadth of the technology industry. Shawn has been in the tape industry for over 20 years participating in the implementation of LTO-1, developing, field support and business strategy for tape. His current position is as a market strategist and analyst internal to IBM, assisting clients and business leaders in understanding the tape market dynamics. During his time at IBM, he has accumulated multiple patents, published papers, attended global conferences speaking on a broad range of topics related to storage including, technical aspects, solution implementation and sustainability.
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