- US GSA has 14,000 tapes and an unknown amount of tape units
- The data moved to a new unknown media platform that seems to have worm capabilities
- US GSA claims to save $ 1 million per year (or around $ 70 per year per tape).
The United States Government Efficiency Department (Doge) has published in X (previously known as Twitter) with the IT team of the US Gerneral Services Administration. UU. (GSA) “has just saved $ 1 million per year by converting 14,000 magnetic tapes (70 years of old technology for information storage) to permanent modern digital records.”
The comment does not include any context in which tape technology was used (reel or cartridge), how long it took to transfer the data of the tapes and what is the new storage technology that replaces the tape.
The word “permanent” leads us to believe that it is a solution of “write once, read many” (worm) where once written, the data cannot be modified.
In addition, the allusion to the age of technology (70 years) lets us guess whether the real platform that is replaced is 70 years old (very unlikely) or if the technology on which it is based is 70 years old.
(Ed: As a reminder, the first hard drive was launched in 1956 and the first NAND (the basic SSD component) appeared in 1987).
Using old technology itself makes a lot of sense in many critical mission situations: after all, why change something that is not broken?
The US Strategic Automated Control and Control System.
And the 65 -year -old Cobol programming language is still used by thousands of main organizations worldwide and, in the last count, handled transactions worth $ 3 billion every day (or more than $ 1 quadrillones of dollars per year).
So, does the tape have a future in 2025?
BET! The film is still very relevant for this day to great organizations and hyperscalers. It may have disappeared almost from the consumer market, but they are the only means that have demonstrated longevity at scale.
Linear Tape-Open (LTO) is the main format in the market and is backed by technological giants such as Fuji, Sony, HPE and IBM, just a platform that will disappear during the night.
The LTO organization, which Supervisa LTO has published a road map for the next 15 years with the expectation that the capacity of the tape will increase from a native 18 TB to 576 TB, an increase of 32x.
Pipedream? Well, IBM and Fujifilm demonstrated a ribbon prototype with a capacity of 580TB in … December 2020. Therefore, a 576 TB tape is probable when the market conditions say it, they are very high.
In addition to its reliability, the tape is also much cheaper than any other means, they do not consume energy and can be off for better protection against ransomware attacks.
You can also do it physically worm), which does it alone and the magnetic tapes are waterproof to the emphasis of man (electromagnetic pulse).
Forget SSD (too expensive) and optical discs (limited useful life), at this time, there is only one winner when it comes to data files, cold storage (or plans to store 25,000 films) and that is a good tape.
However, there are competitors on the horizon for adhesive tape. Cerabyte, a startup backed by a CIA proxy and pure storage, is planning a 10pb cartridge that lasts 5000 years. Microsoft has been working on project silica for almost 10 years, while DNA storage has the potential to change the entire data storage market. Other candidates include 5D memory crystal, rare earth crystal, fluo ray discs,
However, everyone is not tested and will take years before reaching the market state. So, despite the fact that the film is 70 years old, it is a septuagenerian who is alive and kicking rear, promoting 30pb libraries and very anxious to turn 100 years.
Techradar Pro has contacted five organizations that have great interest in digital tape technologies to comment.
