Looking Towards the Light

After a long hiatus because of school and personal matters, I am back in action and excited to talk about today’s topic. Before we get into that, here are a couple of announcements. First, I have finished my degree in Information and Telecommunication Technology, and currently re-working my resume to start sending out applications. Second, I am still working part-time for Greg Schulz, owner and founder of StorageIO, and you should check out his blogs [here].

 

As you might have guessed, today we are looking toward the light. No, not the desk lamp next to you, the sun outside (which you shouldn’t stare at by the way), or some metaphor. Today, we are going to be talking about optical storage. I originally found out about this medium through Greg Schulz, when we were conversing about different types of data storage. The conversation spread though the usual mediums, starting with solid state drives (SSD), moving to hard disk drives (HDD), and finally tape. Sometimes we would even shake things up and talk about all three at the same time *gasp* (details on those conversations will come on at a later time). At the end of the conversation, he asked me one question, “Have you heard of optical storage?”

 

I had studied optical networking before then, but had never even heard of optical storage. Naturally, my first questions where what is it used for, and if it was even in use today. He responded by asking me what I thought Blue-Ray discs were. He also mentioned Facebook doing something with optical storage if I was interested in learning more.

 

With that, I was on my way researching all I could about optical storage. I found a lot about what optical storage was, and how it works.

 

A magnified view of an optical disc with data burned on it. Credit given to igcseict.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The picture above is of a magnified CD surface. Can you see the dots in the picture? The pattern of these dots is your data. When you are burning your favorite Justin Beiber song on a CD (if you still use them), your computer is creating a pattern on the CD to store that song. When inserted in a CD player, the laser inside will reflect the surface/pattern of the CD back to itself, and play the song.

 

Trying to find how it is used in the industry proved to be more challenging.

 

Facebook’s Blue-ray rack. Image: Kyle Owen

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The short version:

-At this time all of Facebook’s cold storage is stored on HDD.

-They believe swapping to an optical system will be 50% cheaper then disk, and 80% more power efficient.

– Each disk is certified for 50 years of reliability

– Believes this is something better then disk, or tape for future demand for cold data.

 

If you would like the full article, you can click [here]

 

Is Facebook heading a paradigm shift in storage, or is their optical solution a dying hope to make optical a valuable alternative to tape archiving? My personal thoughts, and more will be explained in part two.

You can check out my other blog posts [here], and follow me on Twitter @StudentofIT. Until then, take care. 🙂

 

Cory Peden

 

Myth Busters-Tape Edition

Myth Busters

A while back my mentor Greg Schulz, founder of StorageIO, asked me what did I know about tape? I told him the topic has come up in my studies, but was looked down upon as a slow and old method for saving data. From this he asked if I would be interested in talking with someone who works with tape, and to shed some light on these myths I had. That is how I came in contact with Rich Gadomski. Rich works for Fujifilm as the Vice President of marketing for the commercial product division. During our talk, I learned my perspective of tape had been misguided. Below are some of the myths about tape, and the truth behind them.

Myth: Tape is slow

I hear this claim all the time with fellow students who jumped on the SSD bandwagon. The first question I ask them is why is tape slow? True if you are doing random reads tape will be slower than disk. However what if we want sequential reads, or sequential writes? Let us look at the specifications of Fujifilm’s most current magnetic tape LTO G6. Uncompressed LTO G6 has the ability to read/write sequential data at a rate of 160 MB/sec. If that data is compressed, the transfer rate can reach as high as 400 MB/sec. The issue is your network’s ability to feed data to your tape, not the tape itself.

Myth: Tape has low capacity

How many people who clam this really know the capacity of current tape? Before my interview with Rich I had no knowledge of the capacity of tape, but was surprised how comparable it was too Hard disk drives (HDD). I went to Seagate’s web site to learn current capacity of enterprise 2.5 and 3.5 HDD, compared it to Fujifilm’s LTO G6. The highest capacity of a 2.5 enterprise HDD capped out at  1TB, while a 3.5 enterprise HDD capped out at 6TB. LTO G6 currently has a capacity of 2.5 TB uncompressed and 6.25 compressed.

This is possible because of Barium Ferrite (BaFe). BaFe is a magnetic particle found in Fujifilm’s LTO G6 tapes. It is less dens then the metal particles found in older LTO tapes, and this allows more data to be stored on a single tape. Fujifilm predicts that this breakthrough will allow tape to reach a capacity of 35TB of uncompressed data in the near future.

Myth: Tape will be dead in 10 years

Let us look at what we have talked about so far, and see if this is true. We know tape is fast when it comes to sequential reads and writes. This makes tape perfect for recording, or recovering large sums of data.

Something Rich pointed out to me that I had never thought about is tape is cheap to maintain. You have to power SSD and HDD 24/7 costing money, and taking up resources. Yes this might not seem like much, but when you are powering hundreds of these devices, and powering the systems to keep them running (cooling, UPS systems, ect..) it starts to add up. Tape requires no power when it is not in use, and as long as it is stored within 60-95 degrees will maintain integrity.

Let us take a closer look at the integrity/reliability of tape, HDD, and SSD. It is not fair to compare the software that checks reliability since often times tape is used to save data after it has been on these other mediums for some time. This means the data has been checked multiple times if it is reliable before it is even written to tape. What we can look at is how all three compare when it comes to physical reliability.

When the tape in the cartridge snaps, is it possible to repair the tape, and recover most of the data? The answer is yes. The tape can be sent to a number of vendors to be repaired, and while there might be some data loss it is possible to recover most of the data. The same is true for HDD if it has been scratched, and SSD if a sector has gone bad. What does this mean? The answer is simply all three have roughly the same reliability physically.

We also know currently tape is competitive when it comes to capacity, and is only expected to grow in the future. The same is true for both HDD and SSD. While growth capacity for HDD has slowed down over the past couple of years new advances are currently being developed to ensure the continuant use of HDDs.

Closing thoughts

People need to stop seeing it as  tape vs. disk, tape vs. flash, or flash vs. disk.  My beliefs about tape, HDD, and SSD are the three should be working together to provide the best solution. Too often, we read about how one is going to replace the other, or how one is going to be gone in the next ten years. In reality, they have been coexisting for years, and will continue to do so for years to come. Next time you hear someone talking down about tape, educate them in their myths.

 

What’s Next

Over the next few weeks, a variety of topics are going to be covered. Optical, Buzzword Bingo, IPv6 are some of these topics.

I encourage fellow students of IT to leave suggestions on topics they would like to read about, and to engage in the conversation. After all, innovation cannot happen without conversation.

Feel free to follow me on twitter at Studentof_IT

Until next time

Cory Peden