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    • Storage

    Sticking With Tape—For the Time Being

    Written by

    Peter Coffee
    Published August 12, 2002
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      Massive reels of magnetic tape are a long-standing visual cliché. Those spinning reels are almost as popular as walls of blinking lights when a movie director needs to tell the audience, “Here is a big computer.” So it could remain for decades to come because magnetic tape (with or without those photogenic reels) refuses to be displaced as a storage medium—while technical, even social, demands on our IT systems are dramatically expanding our need for low-cost archival.

      The more you know about tape, the harder it is to believe that it works. As tape is wound from one reel to another, the flexible backing stretches; the magnetic coating stretches less, leading in the long run to flaking and shedding. When a magnetic field is applied to produce a record, there isnt a simple proportion between the strength of the field and the strength of the persistent change in the magnetic state. That nonlinear relationship requires well-tuned electronics, as well as a recording head that can focus the field on the smallest possible area so that data can be recorded at maximum density.

      But tape refuses to knuckle under to the fact that it shouldnt work nearly as well as it does. At half a cent per megabyte of storage, tape is dirt-cheap; at 20 to 30 years of shelf life, tape satisfies our enterprise needs for even what we call long-term storage.

      And tape is still getting better. In May, on the 50th anniversary of its first tape drive introduction (1.4MB on a 12-inch reel), IBM announced the achievement of storing a terabyte of data on a single 4-inch-by-5-inch cartridge—the equivalent, the company estimated, of 16 continuous days of DVD video, storing data on tape at 900M bits per square inch. In June, IBM shipped new commercial drives storing 180GB per cartridge and offering transfer rates of 42MB per second (at 3-to-1 compression).

      With “Lord of the Rings” amassing 150 terabytes of video and with corporate e-mail archives (increasingly subject to record retention requirements) and e-business transaction records in hot pursuit of comparable data volumes, we need compact and low-cost archival more than ever—and we need to avoid the assumption that tape, just because its old, is no longer a competitive solution.

      Tell me what tape has done for you lately at [email protected].

      Peter Coffee
      Peter Coffee
      Peter Coffee is Director of Platform Research at salesforce.com, where he serves as a liaison with the developer community to define the opportunity and clarify developers' technical requirements on the company's evolving Apex Platform. Peter previously spent 18 years with eWEEK (formerly PC Week), the national news magazine of enterprise technology practice, where he reviewed software development tools and methods and wrote regular columns on emerging technologies and professional community issues.Before he began writing full-time in 1989, Peter spent eleven years in technical and management positions at Exxon and The Aerospace Corporation, including management of the latter company's first desktop computing planning team and applied research in applications of artificial intelligence techniques. He holds an engineering degree from MIT and an MBA from Pepperdine University, he has held teaching appointments in computer science, business analytics and information systems management at Pepperdine, UCLA, and Chapman College.

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