Transcripts
Did you know that backup tape is experienced a resurgence in demand?
Speaker:And it's for a reason, I never even contemplated.
Speaker:When I was using it in the data center over 30 years ago.
Speaker:On last week's episode, I talked about how I created a real air gap back
Speaker:then using tape and iron mountain.
Speaker:This is a gap that even the best ransomware cannot penetrate.
Speaker:And that's why tape is getting a second wind.
Speaker:And this episode, we talked to two experts from IBM and Fujifilm who are
Speaker:sponsoring this episode and they help us understand what makes tapes so special.
Speaker:It's fast.
Speaker:Immutable holds data reliably far longer than discount.
Speaker:And it costs less.
Speaker:I've been a fan of tape since I cut my teeth on it in the early nineties.
Speaker:And I'm excited to hear this news.
Speaker:I'm Debbie Curtis precedent, AKA Mr.
Speaker:Backup, and this podcast turns unappreciated backup admins
Speaker:and to cyber recovery heroes.
Speaker:This is the backup wrap-up.
Speaker:Hi, and welcome to the backup wrap up.
Speaker:I'm your host w Curtis Preston, and I have with me the guy that should have told me
Speaker:that I hadn't pressed record last time.
Speaker:Prasanna Malaiyandi
Speaker:I know, I know.
Speaker:It seems like this is like our first podcast episode.
Speaker:You know that we don't know anything.
Speaker:Yeah, luckily, you know, we record the news separate from
Speaker:the, the main part of the podcast.
Speaker:Luckily it was just a news segment, so we just, we talked for about 10
Speaker:minutes and then I went to end the recording and I'm like, um, persona.
Speaker:Well, and the funny thing is I was like, huh, I wonder how long this episode is.
Speaker:And I tried finding the, 'cause there's normally elapsed time that it shows.
Speaker:And I was like, huh, that's interesting.
Speaker:I don't see it.
Speaker:Maybe they moved JT ui.
Speaker:You know how these SaaS products are, they're always changing things around.
Speaker:They are indeed.
Speaker:It is time for the news of the week.
Speaker:So our first story, uh, you know, interesting headline,
Speaker:Backblaze Blitzes, cloud Storage Speeds with Shard Stash Cache.
Speaker:that's a mouthful.
Speaker:What does it mean, Curtis?
Speaker:First off you have to talk about Backblaze.
Speaker:Backblaze is both a backup vendor and a storage vendor.
Speaker:They have a product that competes with, uh, AWS S3, and this is
Speaker:specifically talking about that product.
Speaker:They call it B two.
Speaker:They write the incoming data to hard drives, but at the same time,
Speaker:they're also writing it to SSDs.
Speaker:And because the way they're uploading the data is a piece at a time, a
Speaker:common term that we use in that world is shard for that, uh, piece of data.
Speaker:And so they're calling it a shard stash.
Speaker:Otherwise known as a cache.
Speaker:Um, and they're comparing it, uh, and saying that it's significantly
Speaker:faster than uploading to S three as a
Speaker:result.
Speaker:What they're doing is writing in parallel to both the SSD and the hard drive.
Speaker:Once it hits the SSD, then they could reply back to the client, which
Speaker:helps with latency, which is where you see a lot of the performance
Speaker:improvements, and especially when you start to talk about small files.
Speaker:This is where it makes a significant improvement in performance.
Speaker:I think they quoted sort of 30% better latency than.
Speaker:Normal S three because they're able to accept the right immediately and then
Speaker:acknowledge the client, which will then send the next piece, versus having to
Speaker:wait for it to commit to, uh, hard drives, which might take a little bit of time.
Speaker:Remember, it's not just writing to one hard drive.
Speaker:They're writing across multiple hard drives, across multiple
Speaker:systems for redundancy purposes.
Speaker:So to make sure everything's okay, they need to wait for all those
Speaker:commits to come back, which takes time.
Speaker:I think they say it needs to hit 19 out of 20 hard disk.
Speaker:And so that could take time
Speaker:versus writing to SSD, acknowledging.
Speaker:And then once it does make it to hard drive, then you can remove it
Speaker:from the SSD because it has been persisted in its final location.
Speaker:It just seems odd to write it to both places at the same time rather than to
Speaker:just write through one to the other.
Speaker:But that is what they're doing.
Speaker:And any other advantages that you can think of
Speaker:for doing this?
Speaker:Remember, backup data sets are typically a bunch of small file rights, right?
Speaker:You're not gonna be sending a single 10 gig file, right?
Speaker:Even though you might be sending it in smaller chunks.
Speaker:And so this is where it could help with the performance.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:They did a test specifically with Veeam backup, and they backed up a
Speaker:terabyte of VMs with 256 K block sizes.
Speaker:They're saying with S three, it took three hours of 12 minutes.
Speaker:With, uh, B two, it took two hours and 15 minutes so that,
Speaker:you know, that's 40% faster.
Speaker:Our second story
Speaker:Is about Cohesity.
Speaker:Um, so they have introduced a new integration that allows, uh,
Speaker:Cohesity Smart Files to become Snowflake Analytics playground.
Speaker:And so really what it is, is Snowflake.
Speaker:You have a bunch of data that has been stored there.
Speaker:It could be backup data, but Cohesity give you secondary NASS capabilities.
Speaker:Where you can now just export a mountain point and store your data there.
Speaker:And now with this integration, what it allows is, instead of having to copy the
Speaker:data out and into Snowflake, in order to be able to process and do that and move
Speaker:the data out, they now allow Snowflake to run their analytics against the
Speaker:data that's already stored in Cohesity.
Speaker:So saving you that copy operation, the movement operation, and
Speaker:allows you to run it locally.
Speaker:I don't know a ton about Snowflake, but basically it sounds like
Speaker:they're, they're allowing full support for Snowflake within their.
Speaker:World, which, um, what it does is it increases the, the perceived value of that
Speaker:product within a particular environment, if that customer is a Snowflake user.
Speaker:The other thing is that it's not just Cohesity running on premises, but if
Speaker:you have a Cohesity instance that's running smart files in the cloud, you can
Speaker:also connect directly to that as well.
Speaker:And if you have Snowflake running in the cloud, you could pull the data from there
Speaker:or access the data from there directly.
Speaker:Well, that's the news of the week.
Speaker:This episode is sponsored by IBM and Fujifilm.
Speaker:Our first guest is Rich, who works for Fujifilm Recording Media, USA,
Speaker:and has been in marketing of tape storage for some 30 years now.
Speaker:Rich writes a blog called Fujifilm Insights that could
Speaker:be found@fujifilmusa.com.
Speaker:Welcome to the podcast Rich Gadomski.
Speaker:Hey, thanks very much Curtis.
Speaker:Prasanna, great to be here again.
Speaker:Thanks for having me.
Speaker:Glad to have you.
Speaker:Our next guest is a tape evangelist who's been ensuring the preservation
Speaker:of the world's digital history.
Speaker:Welcome to the podcast, Shawn Brume.
Speaker:Thank you very much.
Speaker:It's a great honor to be here.
Speaker:Well, we're glad to have both of you.
Speaker:This is actually our first official sponsored episode, so we're very excited
Speaker:to have two friends of the pod on.
Speaker:How are things in the tape world these days?
Speaker:Shawn, take it away.
Speaker:Well, I, you know, tape, tape is having really a great big resurgence in the
Speaker:technology market, and we say resurgence.
Speaker:It's never really gone away.
Speaker:It's.
Speaker:Into the enterprise, but it more and more people are looking at
Speaker:things like cyber resiliency and saying, how do I protect data?
Speaker:How do I really air gap it?
Speaker:And tape is fundamentally at its core air gap, cyber resilient.
Speaker:Yeah, you know, uh, Prasanna, you remember, I think it was just last
Speaker:week, wasn't it, that we recorded an episode where we talked about the,
Speaker:basically what I'm now calling old school air gap or, or actual air gap,
Speaker:Yeah, I remember that.
Speaker:Versus a virtual air gap or.
Speaker:exactly.
Speaker:Because everybody's using the term air gap now, and, and we recorded this
Speaker:episode where we basically said, uh, you know, this is about cybersecurity.
Speaker:I, I remember, I.
Speaker:Back in the day, we weren't really thinking so much about cybersecurity.
Speaker:We were just thinking, let's get a copy of these backups far away from
Speaker:the thing that we're backing up.
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:Let's put it in a box, hand it to a man in a van, and then it would show
Speaker:up somewhere else and then magically reappear back in a few weeks, and
Speaker:then we could recycle those tapes.
Speaker:We were mainly thinking about.
Speaker:You know, just, you know, getting a gap of air in order to protect it from a
Speaker:fire or a flood or something like that.
Speaker:But nowadays, uh, it, it sounds like the, you know, the, one of the primary
Speaker:reasons people are thinking about tape has to do with cybersecurity.
Speaker:What rich does that seem about what you're saying?
Speaker:You know, to your point, tape was always, uh, you know, great for DR.
Speaker:Applications, backup, DR.
Speaker:Obviously archive.
Speaker:Uh, and I think the reason for that is because it is so portable, easily
Speaker:removable from its environment so you can safely get it offline, offsite.
Speaker:Uh, and that's really critical today.
Speaker:Uh, you know, more so as you mentioned, it's not just about, you know, hurricanes
Speaker:and fires and floods, um, earthquakes.
Speaker:You know, it really today the threat is, uh, cyber related.
Speaker:Um, so anything that's connected to the network, in our opinion, and I
Speaker:think most experts would agree if it's connected to the network, hackers
Speaker:can figure out how to access it.
Speaker:Um, and, and so when it comes to, to data storage, you know, getting,
Speaker:at least mission critical data, offline, offsite, um, is a best
Speaker:practice that, you know, a lot of the, um, you know, federal government
Speaker:agencies are advocating for today.
Speaker:When you look at the FBI, um, CISA, uh, department of Homeland Security,
Speaker:um, even to a certain extent.
Speaker:Securities and Exchange Commission.
Speaker:Uh, it's interesting, you know, what they're talking about now.
Speaker:Um, and we can get more into that, but, but definitely tape, you know,
Speaker:was always removable, always portable.
Speaker:Um, it's gotten better today because of its, you know,
Speaker:incredible capacity increase.
Speaker:So, just to give you a quick example, um, you know, if you go back 10 years ago
Speaker:with LTO-6 to get one petabyte off site would take 160 tapes, 160 cartridges.
Speaker:Okay?
Speaker:It was only 2.5 terabytes compressed, you know, 6.25, that's how you get the one 60.
Speaker:Well, today with LTO nine, you're talking about 23 tapes.
Speaker:You're talking about a, a case of tapes to put a petabyte offsite offline.
Speaker:So it makes a lot of sense today.
Speaker:And of course, it's, you know, very, very cost effective.
Speaker:So I know we talked about sort of the air gap, Curtis, and I know on our last
Speaker:episode we talked, and Rich, you just mentioned sort of you could take tape and
Speaker:you could move it offline, which is great.
Speaker:Uh, take it out, move it off site.
Speaker:I think one thing though, Curtis, that came up in our conversation
Speaker:last week, which I hadn't really thought about, is the process aspect.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:Part of it is keeping your data offline, but the other thing is being able to
Speaker:build a completely separate process to ensure that that hackers could not
Speaker:get to your data even if they tried to.
Speaker:So I know the example you gave Curtis was Iron Mountain having
Speaker:a separate call in, right.
Speaker:Having sort of a mechanism to allow for.
Speaker:Data to only come back to be restored or deleted, which is a separate
Speaker:exception process that needs to be verified by multiple people.
Speaker:All these things, which get a little bit more difficult from a virtual
Speaker:air gap solution perspective versus a physical tape where you have the
Speaker:flexibility because it's offline.
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:I can just move those 23 tapes like you were mentioning, rich, right?
Speaker:I could just move it from one location to another location.
Speaker:Fairly easily, but trying to move all that data physically over a
Speaker:network would probably be impossible.
Speaker:Plus the controls you need in place from a process perspective.
Speaker:Never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck.
Speaker:That's right.
Speaker:Truck nets.
Speaker:Um, you, you bring that up.
Speaker:That is such a great point.
Speaker:Um, you know.
Speaker:That is, I think that's where Rich was going, was that the scale of data
Speaker:today, if you start looking at AI applications and, and IOTs that are
Speaker:pulling together all this data and it needs to be protected, well, how
Speaker:do they one fundamentally protect it?
Speaker:Air gap wise?
Speaker:What's the process?
Speaker:Um, but number two, how do you meet the scale?
Speaker:Because as you said, can you imagine taking a petabyte every night and
Speaker:just pushing it over the wire, right?
Speaker:Just, just to protect it, not to create transaction or anything else,
Speaker:but just to preserve that data.
Speaker:Um, the other point that comes behind that is how do you establish a second site?
Speaker:Easily and effectively, if you've got it coming in to a single site, if IOT's
Speaker:collecting from the edge and coming into the data center, how do you propagate it?
Speaker:And tape is being used as that air gap orchestration to say,
Speaker:Hey, move the data, stream it in.
Speaker:And what a lot of people don't realize is, uh, there's always
Speaker:talk of, well, tape's slow, right?
Speaker:I, I, well,
Speaker:You won't hear that here, trust me, Shawn, you won't hear that from this podcast.
Speaker:Fundamentally, it's linearly extremely high performance.
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:And those that deal with it.
Speaker:Now, if you're gonna go get little segments, sure.
Speaker:So if you're gonna stream that data in, there's nothing that can stream like tape
Speaker:as far as efficiency, and then move the truck net, um, take the truck net and move
Speaker:that whole, and we talk a petabyte today.
Speaker:But a petabyte's a start.
Speaker:I mean, usually people are talking about Y ingest.
Speaker:You know, a hundred petabytes a year and I need to move 10% or 15%
Speaker:of that data on a regular basis.
Speaker:Um, so we've seen a lot of orchestration around not only the air gap
Speaker:protection, which is multi-layered, but also how do I reestablish a site?
Speaker:How do I make it easier to move all that data?
Speaker:And tape's great because for portability, it's safe to port your data with it.
Speaker:Right there.
Speaker:There are a number of workflows that involve.
Speaker:F transporting a, you know, a lot of data on a very regular basis,
Speaker:and those workflows are very.
Speaker:Tape friendly.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:I, I think of, I certainly think, I, I live in Southern California, you
Speaker:know, right up the road there's a whole bunch of people who make a whole lot of
Speaker:stuff on a very regular basis, and that stuff needs to be transported around.
Speaker:Tape is very popular when I go to National Association of Broadcasters.
Speaker:Right at the NAB show tape is very popular at NAB.
Speaker:Shawn you mentioned about the concern.
Speaker:It, it's so funny when I'm talking to just random people that, that
Speaker:aren't deep within the backup world, I say, I'm, I'm gonna ask
Speaker:you a fill in the blank question.
Speaker:And I, you know, and I want them to fill in the blank and to say
Speaker:the reason that we, that, that the, a lot of the backup world moved.
Speaker:You know, from tape to disc, was it because tape was too blank?
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:And everyone always says slow, right?
Speaker:They're like, oh, tape was too slow.
Speaker:It's like, no, that was not the problem.
Speaker:The problem was we couldn't match the speed of the tape, right?
Speaker:So tape is actually really, really fast.
Speaker:Um, you know, the, the, the problem that we have is like with
Speaker:incremental backups and trying to, you know, make the tape drive happy.
Speaker:Uh, that's the challenge that we, that, that became the new challenge.
Speaker:But all of those great things about tape, the cost effectiveness, and it's not
Speaker:even like, it's not even close, right?
Speaker:I, I've done a number of cost comparisons when I look at tape versus disc, even
Speaker:disc with deduplication, that even if the disc were free, like even if you
Speaker:bought the dis array, uh, for, for a dollar, that the power and cooling to, to.
Speaker:To, uh, operate that dis array would be more than the cost of an entire tape-based
Speaker:system that you purchased and operated.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:So it it, it's not even close from a, from a cost perspective.
Speaker:And then let's also talk a little bit about, again, you're, you're, you're
Speaker:with Friends of Tape here, right?
Speaker:We, we talk a lot about the, um.
Speaker:Uh, the bit error rate of tape versus disc and competing technologies.
Speaker:Do you want to talk about that a little bit?
Speaker:Who wants to talk about that?
Speaker:Rich or Shawn?
Speaker:Let me, let me hit the TCO point and I'll turn over to bit error rate if you want
Speaker:Rich to you or I can handle that as well.
Speaker:Um, but little bit about T-C-O-I-I totally agree with you.
Speaker:When you talk about the total cost of ownership, you have
Speaker:to put everything in there.
Speaker:You can't just say, well, you know, I found an HDD at
Speaker:Costco that's only 62 bucks.
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:Um, okay, great.
Speaker:But there's a lot that goes along with that.
Speaker:Um, and one of the things that gets.
Speaker:Gets thrown out is the fact that there's a carbon impact to that, right?
Speaker:When you start talking about maintaining that data and spinning that energy,
Speaker:there's a serious carbon impact.
Speaker:So we totally agree.
Speaker:Uh, and I don't run into too many people anymore that say, um, well I
Speaker:can do HDD for the same cost unless they have a very small amount of data.
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:Um, they, they, they're pretty open and, and rich, do you wanna do bit error rate,
Speaker:or do you want me to throw in a couple of
Speaker:Yeah, I mean, I'll just keep it real simple.
Speaker:Uh, with the latest generation of LTO, um, say LTO nine and, uh, the, um,
Speaker:TSS 1170, uh, the IBM 35 92 product.
Speaker:The bit error rate is expressed as one times 10 to the 20th power.
Speaker:So that com, that's several orders of magnitude better, uh,
Speaker:than what you have with HDD, uh, and flash, which is typically.
Speaker:One times 10 to the 15, 16, or 17th power.
Speaker:So what does that mean in terms of, like for our listeners, right?
Speaker:If I had X amount of data, I would expect one bit to be flipped.
Speaker:How often, like, or based on how much data?
Speaker:it, it, yeah, 1, 1, 1 bit in 10 times 10 to the 20th.
Speaker:Power.
Speaker:That's a lot is 20 zeros.
Speaker:So that's, so that's like one bit in every a hundred petabytes
Speaker:Ver versus one bit in every a hundred terabytes, I think, or Yeah, a hundred.
Speaker:Tera.
Speaker:If, if it's three orders of magnitude different, then that would be, and
Speaker:that sounds like that's the, the best.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:Because if it's 20 versus 17, then if it's one petabyte, then it's, um.
Speaker:A hundred terabytes.
Speaker:Yeah,
Speaker:Right,
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:Um,
Speaker:which is
Speaker:which means that you have, you have a bit that is flipped, that is a one instead
Speaker:of a zero, and you don't know it, right?
Speaker:That, that, that's just it.
Speaker:It's the, it's the dirty little secret of magnetic, uh, uh, recording.
Speaker:It's the,
Speaker:well, not, not just magnetic recording all, all recording, right.
Speaker:right, right.
Speaker:And that's, you know, it's, it's the.
Speaker:And the fundamentals.
Speaker:HDD works to counter that with ECC rates.
Speaker:And if you were to convert that, like everybody says, well, you
Speaker:know, a hundred petabytes, what does it really mean in tapes?
Speaker:It means that you would run around the earth 1.5 times almost before you'd hit
Speaker:that bid error rate statistically in tape, um, around the center of the earth.
Speaker:So that's a, I mean, that is a lot of tape processing before you get there.
Speaker:Yeah, and, and we've seen it in practical applications.
Speaker:Um, cern uh, had a great story where, um, they did a migration, I think it was
Speaker:from, maybe it was TSS 1150 to TSS 1155.
Speaker:And they, they transferred a hundred petabytes of data from
Speaker:the lower capacity cartridge to the higher capacity cartridge.
Speaker:And at the end of that process, they had, I think, three or four gigabytes that
Speaker:they couldn't recover, but sent, um, those cartridges to IBM who did recover them.
Speaker:So out of a hundred petabytes, they had no data loss.
Speaker:Um, so, you know.
Speaker:Practically speaking, you don't often see a hundred petabyte migration, but it's,
Speaker:it's a great opportunity to really test, you know, the integrity of the system.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:And, and the other thing that I, that I throw out, if somebody is truly concerned
Speaker:about that, they can literally make another copy for, for next to nothing.
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:That's something you can do in tape, right?
Speaker:Because what, what a lot of people don't think about about tape
Speaker:versus disc is that with disk . The mechanics and the media are.
Speaker:They, they're inseparable, right?
Speaker:They're, everything's all inside.
Speaker:Whereas with tape, the mechanics and the media are two separate things.
Speaker:So the, the, the media has a separate cost element, and so you can have
Speaker:a whole separate copy on tape for much less co, uh, price than I.
Speaker:Like, you can't even compare that.
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:And so if you did have one bit error rate on a, an a crucial piece of
Speaker:data, if you had a second copy, you wouldn't have that bit in the same spot.
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:Um, so lemme, let me ask you a question.
Speaker:Um, so let's say somebody has, uh, they got on the, the d dupe and disc, uh,
Speaker:uh, bandwagon 20 years ago, and, or they're like somebody like Prasanna,
Speaker:who's never seen a tape in the wild.
Speaker:I've seen a tape.
Speaker:I've seen a tape.
Speaker:I've never had to use a
Speaker:Okay.
Speaker:Okay.
Speaker:You've, he's never had to use one.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:What's happened?
Speaker:Or, you know, somebody who maybe, you know, they cut their
Speaker:teeth on, on LTL one, right?
Speaker:And, uh, you know, and, and they remember the days of like lost leader things and
Speaker:all the, you know, those bad, bad days.
Speaker:What can they look forward to as what, what's happened to
Speaker:tape in the last 10 to 20 years?
Speaker:Advancements.
Speaker:Yeah, well, I'll, I'll start Shawn.
Speaker:I mean, the, the big thing is capacity, and I alluded to it earlier, comparing.
Speaker:Say LT oh six to, um, um, LT O nine today.
Speaker:Uh, but just recently, IBM and Fujifilm announced, um, a new 50 terabyte tape
Speaker:cartridge, uh, which is two and a half times, uh, the previous generation of,
Speaker:uh, of the TSS 11 60 35 92 cartridge.
Speaker:So I.
Speaker:If you look at the compound annual growth rate of capacity growth over
Speaker:the last 10 years, the previous 50 years pales in comparison.
Speaker:So a lot of the technological advancements, um, I.
Speaker:Have been happening in the last 10 to 20 years, more so
Speaker:than, um, in the earlier days.
Speaker:So the technological advancements are, are very rapid these days.
Speaker:Capacity is an excellent example.
Speaker:Of course, you know, the cartridge mechanics, the durability.
Speaker:Um, drives and media have been greatly enhanced.
Speaker:Um, so it's a technology that's not sitting still.
Speaker:It's, it's not collecting rust.
Speaker:Uh, it's not, some people say it's not your father's Oldsmobile, and,
Speaker:and that couldn't be more true.
Speaker:Um, but, but look, we, we did a 580 terabyte demonstration,
Speaker:uh, with the IBM lab at Zurich.
Speaker:580 terabytes.
Speaker:That's native capacity on ALTO size cartridge.
Speaker:And in fact, the LTO roadmap has now been extended to LTO 14, uh, which
Speaker:gets very close to that capacity.
Speaker:576 terabytes native, so you're over 1.4 petabytes with compression.
Speaker:Um, so the tech, you know, and do we need that kind of capacity?
Speaker:You know, they're talking about the need to, uh, to protect and preserve
Speaker:up to 26 zettabytes of persistent data by the end of this decade.
Speaker:So just one zettabyte is 55,000,018 terabyte hard drives.
Speaker:55,000,018 terabyte hard drives.
Speaker:One LT nine, uh, one zettabyte is 55 million LT nine
Speaker:cartridges at native capacity.
Speaker:Um, so what's, you know, the, the big picture is data growth is,
Speaker:is truly, um, uh, with, you know, rampant, uh, it's, it is exponential
Speaker:is the word I was looking for.
Speaker:Um, and the, the value of data is increasing.
Speaker:Uh, by leaps and bounds now that we can apply artificial
Speaker:intelligence to IT analytics.
Speaker:So what does that mean?
Speaker:People wanna keep that data now for longer periods of time.
Speaker:How do you do that cost effectively?
Speaker:And you've got a tried and true technology with an incredible ecosystem behind it.
Speaker:Um, you know, we, we recently put out our tape storage council report.
Speaker:You know, there were 25 member companies listed, and that's
Speaker:probably half of the people you know that could be on that report.
Speaker:Um, so there's a tremendous ecosystem, you know, the leaps and bounds of automation.
Speaker:I should let Shawn speak about that.
Speaker:Um, but technology's not sitting still.
Speaker:Rich, you talked about the physical, how much more physically resilient tape
Speaker:has become, and especially LTO tape.
Speaker:So funny little story.
Speaker:Uh, I made a music video and, and we were parroting Adele's rolling in the deep in
Speaker:one shot and, and rolling in the deep.
Speaker:She's smashing dishes against the wall.
Speaker:And so I wanted to smash LTO tapes against the wall and have them like explode.
Speaker:And no matter how hard we hit them against the wall, they wouldn't
Speaker:shatter into multiple pieces.
Speaker:So the only way we were able to get it to work was to physically disassemble
Speaker:them, take out all the screws, and then, and then tape them back together
Speaker:with, with, with scotch tape so that when we would throw 'em at the wall,
Speaker:they would, they would fly apart.
Speaker:Anyway, I just thought you would, you would find that amusing.
Speaker:that's very funny.
Speaker:Uh, but you know, what we find is the, the durability of the cartridges
Speaker:far exceed the actual usage.
Speaker:Typically.
Speaker:Uh, I mean there's, there's very few environments around the world that, um, I.
Speaker:You know, really exceed any, any of the specifications.
Speaker:Um, so, uh, you know, that really durability is, is excellent.
Speaker:I mean, we measure defective parts, parts per million.
Speaker:You know, that's, it's just almost negligible, almost zero.
Speaker:But Shawn, talk about encryption.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Um, I, I think encryption goes into what's been happening with.
Speaker:Over the last 20 years, um, believe it or not, from a hardware point of view
Speaker:in storage tape, really led the industry into that in 2005 six timeframe, uh,
Speaker:introducing AES 2 56, really kicking it up with key management because key
Speaker:lifecycle management was so important.
Speaker:It's embedded in the drive.
Speaker:A certificate in the drive to support synchronous and
Speaker:asynchronous, uh, encryption.
Speaker:And the encryption itself is AES 2 56 up till today, which is still quantum safe.
Speaker:Um, as far as Grover's algorithm goes.
Speaker:Uh, and the latest tape drive TSS 1170.
Speaker:It is prepped.
Speaker:For when NIST finally ratifies the, um, latest and I see everybody's, you
Speaker:know, we're laughing a little bit, but when NIST finally ratifies the,
Speaker:the latest algorithms we're ready to put those certificates in there
Speaker:and get it fully quantum secure.
Speaker:Um, but.
Speaker:On top of that, we've done a lot of stuff in the tape drive.
Speaker:It's that people don't readily grasp onto as a very innovative technology.
Speaker:And, and coming from the backup wrap, wrap up, this is really important.
Speaker:Um, you know, we were talking about incremental backups and
Speaker:the, these little chunks of.
Speaker:Files or, or data that are out there.
Speaker:Um, back in, I circa call it two thousand five thousand six, we started
Speaker:a program inside the drive that does what we call back hitch list flush.
Speaker:And essentially it says, Hey, if you come to me and you've got a bunch of files,
Speaker:you're reading an order and you read.
Speaker:The stop of the file rather than backing up and starting the new file
Speaker:and then just, you know, this real slow process, we're just gonna process it.
Speaker:So inside the process of the tape drive, we just stream down and meet
Speaker:the effectiveness of the tape drive.
Speaker:And then we said, well, let's make it one better.
Speaker:Um, and we introduced in 2015, uh, the ability to say, Hey, I'm gonna pull back
Speaker:these 1000 files or assets or data chunks, um, and they're all over this tape.
Speaker:You drive, tell me the order.
Speaker:I need to go get them in and then tell me that's what you're gonna do.
Speaker:And I'll tell you, go get 'em.
Speaker:And it is proven to reduce the cycle time between 60 and 83%.
Speaker:Mm.
Speaker:At the max, depending on, you know, what, what your, your distance, et
Speaker:cetera is, which goes back to is tape being innovative every single day?
Speaker:It's driving into that.
Speaker:So we're, we're again, leading encryption.
Speaker:Um, some of the individuals who do encryption in the tape
Speaker:drive are the individuals who have led the latest NIST push.
Speaker:As you may or may not know, IBM's.
Speaker:What introduced its algorithms and they're still part of the, the last round, and I
Speaker:guess they're going in round four now, uh, at NIST to get those algorithms approved.
Speaker:So, uh, tape is really heavily engaged and we tell people,
Speaker:don't put your data on a tape.
Speaker:Anything for that matter at rest without encryption, there's no reason.
Speaker:There's no reason there's no penalty.
Speaker:Literally no penalty for using encryption except for no one can
Speaker:ever access your data illegally.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Like you said, Shawn, it's like, yeah, you better make sure you have,
Speaker:uh, encryption turn on because.
Speaker:Like you said, those might leave your physical presence.
Speaker:Those are easy to find, right?
Speaker:Things happen.
Speaker:You wanna make sure that your data is safe, and being able to offload
Speaker:that encryption to the tape drive itself to ensure every single piece
Speaker:of data gets encrypted regardless of what the client is that's
Speaker:writing to the tape, I think ensures standardization across the board rather
Speaker:than ensuring that an admin did not.
Speaker:Or did check the box that said, enable an encryption right at the
Speaker:backup software level, which we know mistakes always happen, right?
Speaker:People get busy, they're not able to always find the right
Speaker:check boxes and settings.
Speaker:So having that on by default makes a lot of sense.
Speaker:I was gonna ask you a question though, Shawn.
Speaker:I know you were talking about the technology to sort of
Speaker:put things in order, right?
Speaker:The drive puts the files in order that need to be read back.
Speaker:Before I started on this podcast and talking to Curtis and learning
Speaker:from the experts like yourselves about tape, I would always think
Speaker:that tape was typically used for sort of full restore cases, right?
Speaker:Hey, I had a site blow up.
Speaker:I need to recover this entire application.
Speaker:Or I have, uh, a table that got dropped.
Speaker:I need to go back three weeks and restore the entire database.
Speaker:But are you starting to see it more and more common, especially in cyber?
Speaker:Instances where it is really more of that file level restore
Speaker:capabilities or a subset of backups that need to come back from tape.
Speaker:You know, in the cyber world, we see that it's actually more of a stream, the
Speaker:whole thing out because they're trying to figure out what's happened to their
Speaker:data and they wanna get it back, um, but they're going to selectively choose it.
Speaker:What we are seeing is an enormous growth in active slash archive use.
Speaker:In other words, I have these.
Speaker:Files and they're active and then they move semi-active
Speaker:and I need two copies anyways.
Speaker:I'm just gonna make my primary data back it all up, push it right to tape,
Speaker:and I've got a second copy on there.
Speaker:And then when I say, Hey look, it's not being touched anymore.
Speaker:I'm gonna get rid of it.
Speaker:In that instance, all of a sudden what happens is.
Speaker:All these requests because no matter how we would like to say, we're never
Speaker:gonna look at our PowerPoints from five years ago, somebody's gonna come
Speaker:back and say, I did a great PowerPoint five years ago and I want that back.
Speaker:And they'll now start pulling those forward.
Speaker:But it's also being used in the.
Speaker:Um, application of, I need two or three copies because it's my service
Speaker:business to provide protection of data, and they are just massive.
Speaker:Massive multi-tenancy environments to go get this data so they're not
Speaker:being requested by one organization.
Speaker:They're being requested by a hundred or a thousand organizations.
Speaker:And that leads to the need for, for, you know, random access ordering.
Speaker:That's what we call it in the tape, which comes back and says, oh yeah, we've got.
Speaker:1200 requests and we're gonna cut the time to get 'em back by 83%.
Speaker:Go, go, go.
Speaker:Yep.
Speaker:So we are seeing a big shift from it cyber's, as you guys know, 3, 2,
Speaker:1, and one is now 3, 2, 1, and one with a zero because nothing can be
Speaker:lost and, and we're seeing more and more of that application coming into.
Speaker:The active archive realm where clients need their data, they need
Speaker:multiple copies, and it comes right back to sustainability and cost.
Speaker:How much do I wanna pay for the second and third copies?
Speaker:Because if the first one truly goes away, I probably have a bigger problem and a
Speaker:little bit of time to get to that data is
Speaker:It's okay.
Speaker:Exactly.
Speaker:At least I have access to it rather than it's gone completely.
Speaker:that's right.
Speaker:Exactly.
Speaker:Um, Shawn, you, uh, you, you talked a little bit about
Speaker:the, the active archive thing.
Speaker:Um, and so, uh, one of the things that, that I thought also we could
Speaker:talk, you know, this, this active archive idea I know is another area
Speaker:where tape is doing really well.
Speaker:Again, for that person, I, I'll just say again, if we take the average.
Speaker:You know it, person on the street.
Speaker:Um, the, the idea of tape.
Speaker:As a place to put data for a very long period of time.
Speaker:Seems really weird.
Speaker:They're like, they're thinking, oh, hard, hard disc.
Speaker:I like hard.
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:Or, or solid, solid state.
Speaker:That sounds really solid.
Speaker:So what, what I'm curious about, uh, rich here.
Speaker:Is I, I'd love to hear about, uh, and of course, I know I already know
Speaker:the answers to this, to this question that I'm asking, but Rich, like what
Speaker:have we done with the media itself in the past however many years?
Speaker:with The most recent 50 terabyte cartridge from IBM.
Speaker:We're using a new substrate, uh, called Aramid.
Speaker:I.
Speaker:Uh, which is thinner and much stronger.
Speaker:We actually are using a, a mix of, um, barium ferri, which is kind
Speaker:of the current defacto standard with NextGen strontium ferri.
Speaker:Magnetic particle.
Speaker:Um, but, uh, I wanna just say thanks for mentioning Active Archive Shawn.
Speaker:Um, you know, that's close to my heart.
Speaker:Uh, it's a great application for it.
Speaker:It really, you know, archive has become a four letter word.
Speaker:I know this is a backup cybersecurity, but the nice thing about an active archive
Speaker:environment is you can easily export.
Speaker:I.
Speaker:A copy of, uh, of the tapes for cybersecurity air gap purposes.
Speaker:But nobody wants to archive, uh, people want, um, 24 7
Speaker:access to their, to their data.
Speaker:Uh, so an active archive allows you to do that cost-effectively.
Speaker:Um, and it isn't frequently accessed data, so you don't wanna keep it on, on
Speaker:spinning disc, um, or on solid state, which are, by the way, great technologies.
Speaker:You know, we need a ton of solid state, we need a ton of disc.
Speaker:We need a ton of tape too, uh, because that's what it's gonna
Speaker:take to really properly protect data and preserve it long term.
Speaker:Um, but the other thing Shawn said was sustainability.
Speaker:Um, sustainability has become a huge issue.
Speaker:I.
Speaker:And it transcends every application, uh, throughout the entire organization,
Speaker:um, including cybersecurity, uh, and, and data protection.
Speaker:So, um, you know, tape consumes 87% less energy than disc.
Speaker:Studies show that it produces 97% less CO two E.
Speaker:And, you know, we were joking at the beginning of the show
Speaker:prior to recording that.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Here I am bundled up because it's freezing cold in New Jersey, but at the end of
Speaker:this week it's gonna be 80 degrees.
Speaker:Um, so it's hard to deny, um, climate change, global warming.
Speaker:I mean, we see evidence of it every single day.
Speaker:And Shawn can speak to this, uh, every single RFQ he gets today for storage.
Speaker:Uh, they wanna know what is the sustainability impact.
Speaker:Let Shawn talk to that.
Speaker:if I could add to, to riches to relate for the, the listener.
Speaker:What, you know, you're talking about trophe or it's an aramid.
Speaker:What does that really mean?
Speaker:Um, the, the benefits long term of, of substrates like aramid are.
Speaker:Think about a, a giant sailboat sail.
Speaker:The, you know, the main sail that really pulls a lot of drag aramid is
Speaker:used in those strands of aramid because they're strong, they're, uh, water
Speaker:resistant, they're sun resistant, and that's what's being used in that tape
Speaker:to preserve the longevity of data.
Speaker:So from a relatable point of view.
Speaker:You know, amid and these other technologies in tape is very advanced.
Speaker:We just don't talk about them 'cause they're kind of under the covers.
Speaker:It's like, so you're putting sailboat cells in your tape.
Speaker:Uh, you, I really don't care.
Speaker:I just want my data to be there.
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:So.
Speaker:I think, I think the, the reason why I wanted to mention it, just sort of the,
Speaker:the overall, um, you know, when we talk about tape versus disc, especially when
Speaker:we talk about long-term storage, right?
Speaker:That, that the thing that people, I think the average person doesn't understand
Speaker:is just how much cheaper tape is just how much better it is at writing
Speaker:ones and zeros than any other medium.
Speaker:And then also really importantly, is how good it is at holding onto those ones
Speaker:and zeros for a really long period of time without any power applied to it.
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:Um, and, and so, and, and some of those advancements came from those substrate.
Speaker:Changes, right.
Speaker:So the, the change to barium, Ferri was a big one.
Speaker:That also, as I recall, that had a big capacity change.
Speaker:'cause you could, you could do different things with the, with the
Speaker:bits and, and put them closer together.
Speaker:Um, and what's really sort of funny to me is as, as we've done changes over the
Speaker:years with tape and, and the bits have gotten closer and closer together on,
Speaker:on, on the media, they're nowhere near.
Speaker:Uh, it's like a astronomical difference between how close they are together
Speaker:on disc, which is why there's such a big difference as to how well it
Speaker:can hold onto those ones and zeros.
Speaker:But anyway, I preach, sorry.
Speaker:Um,
Speaker:it is a good point.
Speaker:But it is a good point though, because I think a lot of people do get confused
Speaker:and they do think, Hey, I can use an SSD for my backup or for my archives, right?
Speaker:And it's like, please don't, I know everyone's space.
Speaker:don't do that.
Speaker:But some people do that, right?
Speaker:They're like, Hey, let me just use this.
Speaker:'cause it's cheap, it's reasonable, it has high performance, but they don't
Speaker:understand that durability aspect
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Or the cost or the energy involved in that.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:It's just, it just gives me the heebie-jeebies.
Speaker:When you talk about doing archives on SSDs, like who, like what, why do you
Speaker:need first off, you know, sorry, sorry.
Speaker:So what's, what tape is really good is holding data for a
Speaker:really long period of time.
Speaker:That's like the best thing it could do for next to nothing from a cost perspective.
Speaker:What, what a, what a SSD is really good at is really fast random
Speaker:access, like really, really fast.
Speaker:Why do you need that with a file that you haven't looked at in 17 years?
Speaker:That's all.
Speaker:That's all
Speaker:Yeah, because when you do look at it in 17 years, you want it to be instantaneous.
Speaker:Curtis, come on.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:Goodness gracious.
Speaker:Instantaneous.
Speaker:That's absolutely
Speaker:true.
Speaker:Shawn, I know you've mentioned a couple times about sustainability,
Speaker:and I know Rich, you were joking about climate change and how it's supposed
Speaker:to be 80 degrees in New Jersey.
Speaker:Could you guys talk a little bit more about what makes tape so great
Speaker:from a sustainability perspective versus the other technologies out
Speaker:there and why it really matters?
Speaker:Prasanna.
Speaker:Carbon impact.
Speaker:I don't like to use sustainability 'cause it has so many, so many
Speaker:offerings, but it is sustainability.
Speaker:The carbon impact of it is huge as we know.
Speaker:It consumes, you know, it data centers consume like 3% of the
Speaker:world's energy all by themselves.
Speaker:Um, but.
Speaker:For tape, what it comes down to is, why is it so much better?
Speaker:Well, to begin with, it's fundamentally offline.
Speaker:The data as stored requires no energy to live for 30 years.
Speaker:That contributes.
Speaker:But then you come back to the way the operation is, each tape drive, and, and
Speaker:let's say you've got 10, you've got 20.
Speaker:Whatever it is, is only around.
Speaker:Let's just average it out at 42 watts.
Speaker:So the average tape infrastructure with 50 petabytes of tape is running, give or
Speaker:take, right around 1.4 kilowatt hours.
Speaker:Um, whereas.
Speaker:nothing.
Speaker:Which, which is almost nothing, right?
Speaker:That's like, uh, what two refrigerators running, um, in your household and
Speaker:50 petabytes on HDD just in energy is running 97% more than that.
Speaker:That's just a huge amount.
Speaker:So you're talking about rather than 3,800 kilowatt hours a year with tape,
Speaker:you're like 28,000 kilowatt hours on HDD.
Speaker:for the HDD, you're just talking about the power, right?
Speaker:Not including the cooling and other aspects yet either.
Speaker:Just the energy that's before the thermal effect.
Speaker:So you throw a thermal effect in there and all of a sudden, by
Speaker:the way, tape has a charge for thermal because one at disadvantage
Speaker:of tape is you do have to keep.
Speaker:The environment regulated.
Speaker:You can't run at 106 Fahrenheit 40 C, right?
Speaker:If you do it, it, it's just very difficult to, uh, hard on the tape.
Speaker:But most environments, humans can't operate in that anyways, very well.
Speaker:It doesn't happen it on the other sustainability aspects.
Speaker:Come what, what Curtis had talked about the longevity of it.
Speaker:Most people don't realize that the average tape library for an
Speaker:enterprise a big, you know, we're talking big where scale matters.
Speaker:Um, last 16.4 years in the field, which would basically be like getting out a one
Speaker:terabyte drive from 2003 today and saying.
Speaker:Yeah, we're good to go.
Speaker:Every, we're gonna put our data on it.
Speaker:Um, so less migrations means less waste, less e-waste because 98.9%
Speaker:of the entire tape infrastructure has a recyclable component to it.
Speaker:It may not be super easy, you know, it may not be just let it rot, but
Speaker:it's recyclable into some sort of.
Speaker:Capability.
Speaker:So that just overall starts to look at data and say, well, if you're gonna do
Speaker:a third copy, I don't need it right now.
Speaker:I really shouldn't need it right now.
Speaker:I can, number one, the, it's something like 68% of CEOs are now
Speaker:being graded on sustainability.
Speaker:Sustainability as in their carbon impact change.
Speaker:And in Europe it's.
Speaker:I, if you're over a certain size, you have to report your carbon impact.
Speaker:Um, so it's now up into the C-suite.
Speaker:So your three Ps matter people performance profits, uh, with profits being last.
Speaker:So it, they're gonna have to start focusing on things like carbon impacts.
Speaker:And we've got lots of data that just demonstrates that at every level from.
Speaker:Embedded to operational to end of life cycle tape is much
Speaker:better for retaining that data.
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:So speaking of the, um, c-suite, uh, you know, and, and, and what they're
Speaker:concerned with, not only sustainability, but bringing it back to cybersecurity,
Speaker:um, you know, the SEC is now looking for, um, cybersecurity disclosures.
Speaker:They are holding the, uh, the board members accountable, uh, for their
Speaker:cybersecurity, uh, preparedness, resilience, what have you.
Speaker:Um, so the, and the investors are looking at that.
Speaker:We'll start looking at that standardized, um, disclosure forms,
Speaker:uh, you know, to make a judgment on the company's preparedness.
Speaker:And, you know.
Speaker:When you look at the cost of taking a petabyte and moving it offsite
Speaker:into an air gap compared to what companies are paying today in
Speaker:ransomware, it's a drop in a bucket.
Speaker:So, it's the last line of defense for sure.
Speaker:There's a lot of things up front you have to do to keep the hackers out,
Speaker:and all those things need to be done, but it is a multifaceted approach.
Speaker:Uh, and I think it's a great insurance policy, uh, you know, to get some of that
Speaker:mission critical data offsite, air gapped.
Speaker:Uh, and, and the boards of these companies are gonna be held
Speaker:personally accountable for it.
Speaker:So hopefully they'll, they'll start, uh, you know, really approving the
Speaker:budgets to, um, to go that extra mile.
Speaker:Uh, you know, the other thing is if you wanna get cyber insurance, uh, you
Speaker:know, the first thing a cyber insurance, uh, underwriter is gonna wanna know.
Speaker:Are you putting your data offsite, offline at the very first?
Speaker:Because they're not gonna give you a policy unless you're
Speaker:following best practices.
Speaker:So, you know, I think that, you know, final comment, you know, putting some
Speaker:data on tape, getting it air gapped, uh, you know, is definitely a best practice
Speaker:today recommended by the government.
Speaker:SEC wants it, cyber insurance companies want it, so let's do it.
Speaker:Absolutely
Speaker:So for, people who may not be familiar with tape or other things like that, or
Speaker:want to learn more, what can they do?
Speaker:Like, where can they go?
Speaker:Yeah.
Speaker:I mean, Fujifilm's got a, a, you know, wealth of information on its own websites.
Speaker:Um, simply Google anything about tape, you'll find it.
Speaker:Um, linear tape open.org.
Speaker:IBM is a treasure trove of information, uh, tape Storage
Speaker:Council, active Arch Archive Alliance.
Speaker:There's no shortage of information.
Speaker:Um, it's just people need to.
Speaker:Um, raise their awareness and take the effort to learn about today's
Speaker:modern, highly advanced tape.
Speaker:I'd say stay off YouTube for the
Speaker:most part.
Speaker:YouTubers love to go back and go, oh, I've got this terrible thing.
Speaker:Tape sucks.
Speaker:Well, well if you're running one from 1972 and it's real to real and it fails on you.
Speaker:Yeah, that happens on occasion.
Speaker:Um, but
Speaker:Wait a second.
Speaker:We, we've got a great video of Shawn on YouTube from our summit meeting
Speaker:talking about sustainability of tape.
Speaker:So go to Fuji Film recording me USA, YouTube and look for Shawn Brummet.
Speaker:He is got a great number of videos.
Speaker:Another one if, if if you have propeller heads.
Speaker:We're all propeller heads on this call.
Speaker:Um, uh, in ssic.org, INSI c.org goes down to the, the nitty gritty of
Speaker:storage technologies on their site.
Speaker:It's a great place to get down into it.
Speaker:Okay.
Speaker:Awesome.
Speaker:Well, that's great.
Speaker:I wanna thank you guys for, for coming on and talking.
Speaker:Thanks, rich,
Speaker:Thank you very much, Curtis.
Speaker:Thanks Prasanna.
Speaker:Thanks, Shawn.
Speaker:Pleasure to be here today.
Speaker:and thank you, Shawn.
Speaker:Well, thank you very much.
Speaker:It was, uh, entertaining.
Speaker:All right, and Prasanna, of course, as always, thanks
Speaker:for, thanks for being a great
Speaker:I try.
Speaker:I try.
Speaker:It was great to meet you, Shawn, and great seeing you again, rich.
Speaker:Thanks.
Speaker:Thanks again.
Speaker:and I want to thank our listeners.
Speaker:Of course, we would be nothing without you.
Speaker:That is a wrap.