3 ms·

HDDs are not, in my opinion, displacing tape. For just about any use case (capacity, cost, latency, reads writes, reliability, electricity, physical space, vend

HDDs are not, in my opinion, displacing tape. For just about any use case (capacity, cost, latency, reads writes, reliability, electricity, physical space, vendor agnosticism etc etc), I think it is HDD that is being replaced on all fronts. For any sort of performance requirement, SSDs and NVME are quickly replacing disk on account that they are more performant, way more reliable, and nearly the same cost as disk, in exchange for a bit less capacity. Tape, if you are willing to spend on a fancy LTO7 drive and wait a few minutes for your data to arrive , is a way cheaper and reliable solution if you are dealing with hundreds of TBs or more in stored data, especially with media files instead of compressed databases. There may be a very specific sweetspot of say, 40TB of data that you need to access very frequently from a server where you have free electricity and don't mind paying a ton for 24/7 runtime and data replicstion or something where it makes sense to just buy the proper amount of disk..... but that is really the exception to the rule. The most cost efficient solution for me will always be SSDs backed up to tape or CDs.

dredmorbius 7y ago
What's the space you're typcially seeing these deployments in? In my experience, tape sees virtually no use in SOHO and even fairly large mid-range corporate use. It is used by large enterprises and many institutional organisations, often with tape libraries and bots. And by large tech firms for warm and cold storage, again, where access-within-minutes is a sufficient SLA. Though robot contention is even worse than drive-head contention. (Realising, at a large financial services firm, that I could script data loads via JCL rather than going through whatever alternative TSPF interactive facility there was as a primary interface made afternoon-long batch runs ... slightly less annoying than they usually were. Though I never did hear back if that was or wasn't appreciated by the out-of-area datacentre operators. I barely recall how to spell JCL any more, to which I attribute mostly trauma-induced memory lapse.) A principle problem with tape is that hardware upgrade and media migration is such a persistent pain. And there's some kerfuffle about the latest round of industrial-grade media and patent disputes that's not helping much (I've remained blissfully largely, though not completely, unaware).
- quaquaqua1 7y ago
  I used to work for StorageTek and I was involved with government/utility/academic workloads where tape was very much still alive until a certain someone decided not to manufacture proprietary drives and cartridges anymore :) I think Lto will continue to be an awesome standard for anyone doing PBs or more with multi decade requirements. I am maybe a little surprised to hear that disk hasn't been completely replaced by SSDs yet but I really do think that SSDs will just continue to drop in price.

dredmorbius 7y ago

What's the space you're typcially seeing these deployments in? In my experience, tape sees virtually no use in SOHO and even fairly large mid-range corporate use. It is used by large enterprises and many institutional organisations, often with tape libraries and bots. And by large tech firms for warm and cold storage, again, where access-within-minutes is a sufficient SLA. Though robot contention is even worse than drive-head contention. (Realising, at a large financial services firm, that I could script data loads via JCL rather than going through whatever alternative TSPF interactive facility there was as a primary interface made afternoon-long batch runs ... slightly less annoying than they usually were. Though I never did hear back if that was or wasn't appreciated by the out-of-area datacentre operators. I barely recall how to spell JCL any more, to which I attribute mostly trauma-induced memory lapse.) A principle problem with tape is that hardware upgrade and media migration is such a persistent pain. And there's some kerfuffle about the latest round of industrial-grade media and patent disputes that's not helping much (I've remained blissfully largely, though not completely, unaware).

quaquaqua1 7y ago
I used to work for StorageTek and I was involved with government/utility/academic workloads where tape was very much still alive until a certain someone decided not to manufacture proprietary drives and cartridges anymore :) I think Lto will continue to be an awesome standard for anyone doing PBs or more with multi decade requirements. I am maybe a little surprised to hear that disk hasn't been completely replaced by SSDs yet but I really do think that SSDs will just continue to drop in price.