Recently, Brad Johns Consulting released the White Paper on The Sustainability of Modern Tape Storage to Improve Information Technology (the "White Paper"), which states: "Given the focus on sustainability and the need for a large number of storage devices to store more data in the coming years, companies will reduce carbon emissions, improve sustainability and reduce costs by migrating less frequently accessed cold data from hard disk drives (HDDs) to modern tape storage." This conclusion brings "tape" back into the public eye.
White paper reveals new value for tape storage
In storage, tape can be described as an "evergreen tree." For many years, tapes have been used to store data from films, finance, archives, exploration, basic scientific research, and more. It is fast, secure and easy to manage, has a long shelf life, and enables a mix of magnetic drives and tapes – the advantages of which can solve many pain points in data storage, so its application range is expanding to more areas.
The amount of global data is increasing year by year, accompanied by an increase in CO2 emissions. Tape also offers advantages for reducing carbon emissions. The IDC (International Data Corporation), a market research authority, predicts that after migrating 80% of archived data stored on enterprise storage systems and 57% of replicated data stored on enterprise storage systems to tape, the annual carbon dioxide emission reduction will be 43.7%, potentially avoiding a cumulative carbon emission of 664 million metric tons between 2019 and 2030.
Power Consumption/CO2 Emissions Avoided by a Coordinated Shift to Tape Storage Worldwide (Credit: IDC)
The white paper takes the FUJIFILM LTO Ultrium 8 (LTO 8) data stream tape, which supports the 8th generation standard of tape storage media "LTO Ultrium", as an example, according to its life cycle estimates, including carbon dioxide generated by the use of tape drives, and is expected to produce 0.114 kg of CO2e/TB/year co2e/year co2e/year over the lifetime of ten years, which is significantly lower than that of hard disks.
In addition to reducing carbon emissions, moving data to tape will also significantly reduce the amount of e-waste. According to the calculations of the white paper, if 100PB of data is stored on the hard disk for ten years, if it is all stored on the hard disk and takes into account that the hard disk needs to be updated after 5 years, 9.2 tons of e-waste will be generated; if 60% of the data is stored on tape, only 4.8 tons of e-waste will be generated; and if all the data is kept on tape, the e-waste will be reduced to 1.9 tons.
E-waste from 100 petabytes of data retention for ten years (Source: Brad Johns Consulting)
Storing cold data on tape also has significant economic benefits. For example, if 100 petabytes of data are retained on hard drives for ten years, the white paper estimates that the total cost of ownership TCO will exceed $16 million, while tape solutions using LTO 8 tape media and tape drives will reduce TCO by more than 70%.
Total cost of ownership for 100 petabytes of data for ten years (Source: Brad Johns Consulting)
Tape Innovation Services Sustainability
On September 25, 2015, the United Nations Sustainable Development Summit officially adopted 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and building a green and healthy global development system has become the consensus of countries and even industries.
The information technology industry is a pioneering area of global innovation and an important part of global sustainability. Represented by tech giants, companies are developing and implementing plans to reduce carbon emissions and promote sustainable development. More importantly, innovations in the information technology industry serve all walks of life while also contributing to the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals.
LTO technology, which originated in 1997, is the cornerstone of a new generation of super storage products, which maintains a high standard of data integrity while also featuring a large capacity and high performance benchmark, and over the years the product has been continuously upgraded and iterated to meet user needs. Fujifilm officially released the latest generation of LTO 9 data streaming tapes in September this year, using patented barium ferrite technology, with a maximum capacity of 45TB (18TB when uncompressed), which is 1.5 times that of LTO 8. LTO 9 achieves high capacity, high convenience and reliability, and can safely and long-term storage of large-capacity data at low cost and energy saving.
LTO tapes are constantly being upgraded to meet the needs of sustainability
The white paper notes that organizations can adopt many different alternatives to address and adapt to sustainability challenges. Ideal sustainability solutions will significantly reduce carbon emissions, minimize the environmental impact of products, reduce expenses, and be easy to implement, so some enterprises with large amounts of stored data are already transferring cold data partially or completely from hard drives to tape storage. IDC has made a similar recommendation – given the high cost of introduction, the time it takes to introduce, and the stability of the problem, it is difficult for data centers to provide all the energy needed by renewable energy. Therefore, it is necessary to reduce the energy required by the data center by importing tape storage.
Factors such as data value, data explosion, and tape technology progress, cost and environmental protection have made tape storage technology revitalized in the new era and served new application scenarios, such as data centers, intelligent clouds, intelligent security and other fields.
Solving data storage isn't just a problem that tech companies need to solve, it's a reality that industries will have to deal with. The white paper also notes that considering the impact of various events and the high focus on global warming, now is the best time to evaluate IT data storage strategies and dump low-frequency accessed data to modern tape storage.
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