Tuesday Jan 23, 2007
Tuesday Jan 23, 2007
Over the last year the fashion has been
to propose that tape is dead
and to store everything on disk. There are several things wrong
with this idea, respectively; environmental (power and weight),
financial and management,
however fashion rarely follows any logic or financial
reasoning. Lets use the car temperature gauge on a
car analogy, storing all data on disk puts us into this
position; 
As we all know, if we were driving a car like this we would need to stop regularly to cool down but we would get to our destination in the end. Probably needing some replacement parts when we get there. This is analogous to disks failing due to overheating, a serious problem when you pack too many disks in an array or are unable to cool a computer room or data center sufficiently. I call this "overheating storage".
However, in the other
extreme we cannot store everything on tape as denoted here, I call this
the Cold Store (bit
like Stockholm at the moment at -8C and dropping).
This is just as unrealistic as the other extreme of storing all data on
disk. So this is no good for a general solution.
As we all know, if we were driving a car like this we would need to stop regularly to cool down but we would get to our destination in the end. Probably needing some replacement parts when we get there. This is analogous to disks failing due to overheating, a serious problem when you pack too many disks in an array or are unable to cool a computer room or data center sufficiently. I call this "overheating storage".
So we need to store data appropriately and drive at a speed were we do not overheat or run out of fuel. This is
how I like to see
the gauge on my car, or manage your data in a well managed IT
department. Store your data on the appropriate media with
appropriate environmental characteristics. This is sustainable
storage. 
This shows the high environmental cost of disk in the top left, requires lots of electricity to power it and then lots to cool it, large upward red arrow. Tape requires little to power it and next to nothing to cool it. This is at the top right, small green downward arrow.
As the amount of data that you produce over time increases, store the old data that you do not need on tape. As the quantity of data you have increases reduce your storage costs. Keep you data on sustainable media, that requires no power when you are not using it and has good capacity to weight ratios, that is TB per kilogram. This is a cool archive.
Now I keep hearing that tape is a security exposure, well that is because people have not been keeping up with tape technology, nowadays all data on tape can be encrypted, with extremely strong encryption. Thus if any tape is lost or stolen your data is safe, it cannot be read by anyone except the company that produced it. Remember tape technology moves on just like other technologies.
So, seat belts and airbags can be provided now, in case we have a crash and the tapes get lost we can use tape encryption to protect our valuables, also our data.
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