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Huawei developing SSD-tape hybrid amid US tech restrictions
- curiousObject 2y agoUp to 2 minutes seek time for cold data. Very niche.
- throwaway48476 2y agoDepends on price. If it was good enough I'd use it for backups.
- loeg 2y agoIt has to cost more than tape alone with the flash media sitting in front of it.
- Etheryte 2y agoThat's true, but this is considerably more convenient than traditional tape. Tape as is requires specialty equipment and careful handling, if I understand the above product proposition correctly, it's just plug and play. Right now, only an enthusiast would use tape in their home setup, with this approach, anyone could use it for their backup server or w/e.
- b112 2y agoMeanwhile, some guide online (probably AI crafted), mixes up swap space and cold storage space. A new swap of death.
- ramses0 2y agoBut, "never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of hard drives". The intriguing use case (thinking as a consumer) is ~2tb "hot", and effectively treating the remainder tape as kindof "append-only/WAL" (and: e.g. incremental backups). I have been randomly ripping my DVDs, mostly keeping the transcoded MP4s, but hesitant to delete the ISO's because they require physical handling and _time_ to re-rip. If it's ~2min to seek to an 8gb ISO, that's potentially faster than re-downloading it from somewhere offsite, and would match my hypothetical use cases really well. Keeping a local ~2tb drive backed up to a ~4tb+40tb "ssd-tape-hard-drive" is probably cheaper than most long-term cloud stuff (backblaze ~$6/tb/mo!!, glacier ~$4/tb/mo, but with lots of asterisks on retrieval time), and simpler than messing around with a NAS. Glad I don't truly have these problems!
- knowitnone 2y agoChina will sell this to you as a service
- fnordpiglet 2y agoIt’s niche enough to be a major industry. Cold storage at extreme scales for very low cost is higher value than it appears - there’s a lot of data that isn’t worth very much individually but has extremely high value if it’s ever needed - but you can’t know ahead of time which data that is. That’s all about ultra low price per gb storage that’s high durable.
- curiousObject 2y agoThis idea adds a fast SSD cache to a slow access bulk archive. Obviously that cache can massively accelerate repeated access to the same data, and reduce tape wear and mechanical wear and energy usage. But I think the critical issue is where you want the cache to be. Because end point devices already have local cache. So this product only seems to have a big advantage on applications where you expect many unique users to access the same archive data for the first time, and within a short period of time before it expires from the tape drive’s SSD cache. This is why I think it’s a small niche. Maybe too small to be worthwhile. Edit: it also has the disadvantage that the first few devices to try to access the data would have a huge delay for a minute or more while the data is located on the tape. It’s also vulnerable to DDOS by attackers requesting random cold data, to fill the SSD.
- magicalhippo 2y agoGot me thinking if anyone tried something ala torrents for utilizing client-side caches to lighten the load on the server. If the alternative is slow storage, getting it from a different client on the LAN might be win.
- dartos 2y agoWell yeah, it’s tape storage.
- petra 2y agoIf you want to build something like youtube, you could store the data from a start of a video, and data defining a slower resolution stream, and more popular videos on the lower latency parts of tapes in your storage arrays, and while the video plays you could go get the rest from the higher latency places. You could also predict What is the next video the user will want. Also, the 2 minute seek time is from one end of the tape to the other. But you could also move accross tracks, vertically so that gives another route for short seek times for some of your data. So it might be possible to build something with a reasonable performance.
- ByThyGrace 2y agoSounds like minute long ads are inevitable and unskippable while the system fetches the video file.
- shiroiushi 2y agoThey'd probably have an easier time getting people to watch ads if they had a message: "please enjoy this message from our sponsor while we wait for your video to be retrieved from the offline archives".
- maccard 2y agoMy workplace archived old builds of our product. It’s very rare that we need them, but we do need them occasionally. We’d happily take 1 hour latency to be able to cheaply store more of them.
- baq 2y agoAlmost literally designed for you: https://aws.amazon.com/s3/storage-classes/glacier/ https://aws.amazon.com/s3/storage-classes/glacier/
- Dylan16807 2y agoIt is, and google and microsoft have similar. But whether it's the best option is a big maybe. Glacier is great at smaller scales, or to make things simple. (Well, great excluding the egress prices.) But by the time your data won't fit on a large NAS (>200TB), a $5000 tape drive and a bunch of $5/TB tapes are cheaper than glacier.
- gwbas1c 2y agoSeems like a great way to: - Archive for the film industry. 2 minutes to retrieve an archived take is a good compromise of cost and time. - Archive for the recording industry. 2 minutes to recover the "master tapes" when you remaster for the umpteenth time is a good compromise of cost and time. - The product I work on has requirements to archive data for a year / 10 years / 20 years and then generate a report. A 2 minute delay is perfectly acceptable.
- jancsika 2y agoThat's plenty quick enough for the Windows Start button. Zing!
- White_Wolf 2y agoThat is not niche at all. Pretty much any gov't, corp, etc that needs long term achives could do with faster access. 2 min is light speed since it's low(er) cost/decade/gb
- Ekaros 2y agoI see lot of reasonable use cases, say something like Internet Archive or library in general. Keep the frequented stuff in more hot cache and then rest of the stuff in colder storage. Without having to actually think about the process. Similar could be some new media production company. Archive B-roll or parts of older videos and then have the stuff you use very common available much faster.
- lightedman 2y agoThis could be easily improved by keeping track of what's on the tape where in part of the SSD, like a length-based filesystem. Then it is just a matter of seeking to that length of tape and finding the actual start of the data. You could take the seek time for cold data to just a couple dozen seconds.
- yapyap 2y agoBut why use tape storage in this day and age?
- dogma1138 2y agoCheap and very very reliable archival storage (essentially no failure modes other than the magnetic media itself), weight and volume wise pretty much still the best density you can get 18TB (up to 45 with compression) in a small 200g package is hard to beat when you need to move peta bytes around. Also tape is much cheaper to produce than platters especially at large volumes.
- nshkrdotcom 2y agoHow does such tape compare to 2" and 1/2" analogue reel to reel tape, in terms of production costs? A new reel of Ampex 2" tape is $375.00 currently: https://vintageking.com/atr-magnetics-studio-master-tape-blue-2 https://vintageking.com/atr-magnetics-studio-master-tape-blu...
- dogma1138 2y agoI don’t know but over the counter direct purchase single unit LTO 9 tapes are about £70-80 each in the UK for 18TB, in large volumes they are much cheaper, I’ve seen quotes in the £30 per tape and that wasn’t at a cloud provider or even massive enterprise scale or anywhere close to that.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- rwmj 2y agoTape has a tremendous density advantage over disks. Think about how much area a tape occupies if you were to completely unroll it, and compare that to a disk platter. The flip side is access times are extremely long compared to disks, but for the usual application of backup and recovery that doesn't matter much. In this case they're pairing the tape with faster non-volatile storage so writes at least will be very quick (reads not so much, 2 minute access time!)
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y agoIs it like a hybrid drive, where there's no special hardware, just a controller trying to cache better than the host device would?
- nialse 2y agoNice idea to integrate all the moving parts in the same cartridge. Probably the economics are favorable now a days. If the components for tape drives are cheap it makes sense to put them in the cartridge and skip all the moving parts in the robot. The question is if the money can be recouped on maintenance saving? Tape robots are quite reliable but comes paired with an expansive support contract to ensure it’s running 24/7. Or maybe the purported cost saving is in the initial procurement? The LTO stuff has always been somewhat pricey.
- m3kw9 2y agoHow are you squeezing the market when your stats say 2Ms(minutes) seek time. If to becomes popular WD can easily copy that tech.
- vachina 2y agoWhen Chinese implements an existing feature: stealing. When WD implements an existing feature: innovation
- placardloop 2y agoThe parent commenter never used or even implied “stealing” nor “innovation” anywhere in their comment. I dunno where you got your strawman from.
- vachina 2y agoI’m commenting on the general attitude the west has toward Chinese tech. But I cannot delete that comment now.
- knowitnone 2y agothere is no innovation here. they combined tape with SSD. What's new or even hard about that? How about we add NVME to tape? Is that innovation? Next you'll tell me they added a propeller to a jet plane and call it innovation. This is basic caching and that concept has been around for ages used with hard drives, CPUs, networking. https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/caching-writes-to-lto-tape-on-ssd.131131/ https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/caching-writes-to-lto-tape... oh look, people talking about caching with ssd! what an innovation!
- m3kw9 2y agoI like how this is forcing china to actually innovate in the semis area instead of a tech lag. It’s a good thing
- renewiltord 2y agoThis is great. I’ve been looking for more local multistage storage: with fast frequent access degrading to slow large capacity. In the future with large volumes I can store the text of the Internet for a personal archive.
- wslh 2y agoELI5: I’ve lost track of tape storage technologies. When does it make sense to use tape backup at home? Most people rely on cloud services or external hard drives for backing up large files like family photos and videos. But is there a point—like a certain amount of data—where it becomes convenient to use tape instead? On the surface, this might seem like a simple question, but let me elaborate with an example: think about storing unavailable movies on high-quality 2K/4K/8K content. Would tape backup be a good fit for this kind of use at home?
- evoke4908 2y agoThe tape market is highly price-fixed and innovation-restricted. Intel has more or less of a total monopoly in this space. It's essentially LTO or go home. Your one and only option is enterprise grade hardware at enterprise prices. Even on eBay, prices are well beyond what I'd consider consumer-accessible. Your best bet is to piece together a fiber channel system and hope you get lucky on a cheap used drive. IBM is wholly uninterested in selling tape to consumers, so you aren't going to have a good time trying to use it anyway.
- shiroiushi 2y ago>The tape market is highly price-fixed and innovation-restricted. Intel has more or less of a total monopoly in this space. Huh? How so? Intel doesn't make tape drives, and never has. IIRC, there are 4 companies making tape drives, including Quantum and HPE.
- wtallis 2y agoThe main problem with tape storage at small scales (including home use) has always been that tape drives are relatively expensive (several thousand dollars new), and buying just one makes it a single point of failure for your backup system. If your data set can fit on one or two dozen hard drives, then hard drives are the cheaper option (unless you keep them powered up and spinning 24/7).
- ghostly_s 2y ago> When does it make sense to use tape backup at home? Never. Tape only makes sense for true cold storage-ie. business-critical backups that are only going to be read back in case of emergency, where a couple days to retrieve the data is an acceptable compromise. "Movies I don't watch very often" are not 'cold' enough- it's just not worth the hassle of switching tapes and maintaining the entirely different infrastructure for even finding the right tape and reading the data. And while the price of the media is attractive, even second hand drives are prohibitively expensive and packed with moving parts to break down. If you really have a use case for offline backups at home BD-R is much more accessible (and I did look into this recently for the same use-case; unfortunately optical disk robots are still out of the reach of enthusiasts too. Could be a cool DIY project though...)
- anoncow 2y agoGive a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach him to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. Ban fish and the man gets into farming and animal husbandry and doesn't need you anymore.
- throwoutway 2y agoThe analogy needs something about IP theft of automated fishing pole designs
- thrw42A8N 2y ago[flagged]
- talldayo 2y ago"Teach a man to fish, he eats for a lifetime. Allow the man to steal your F-35 documents and you must communicate that teaching time is over."
- jamesredd 2y agoThis misses the point. If you gave all of the F-35 IP to India they would still be incapable of developing the indigenous industries required to build a 5th generation fighter in a similar amount of time.
- talldayo 2y agoI think that misses the point too. If China has such competent indigenous aerospace industries then they shouldn't be relying on foreign designs for their engines and aircraft. If everyone else can design a proper 5th gen aircraft, why can't China? Part of China's overall strategy, since the theft of the Su-27 design, has been to exploit foreign concepts to give their military a modern-looking edge. But it's purely a paper tiger - China does not have the industry to even match the engine performance of USSR designs. Hundreds of their J-11 designated Su-27s fly with Russian engines and their current fleet almost entirely relies on potential engine overhauls to meet their minimum operational requirements. The PLA Air Force is an optimistic application of technologies that do not yet exist in the hope that one day it will achieve the desired tactical effect. We can see the effects of this strategy already. China's J-35 has been reportedly very unstable during flight with avionics and engines only reaching basic functionality. Of course, there is no F-35B clone either, so they've really only implemented the least-strategic models with what sounds like a skin-deep reverse-engineering job. China stole the designs to look tough, and now they're hiding the prototypes before they embarrass them in action. You might as well have just given the designs to India at that point, at least they're honest about their reliance on Russian technology.
- grishka 2y agoReminds me of how some manufacturers tried to combine a small SSD with a large HDD the same way in the early 2010s.
- Andrew6rant 2y agoHaha, Apple was still selling iMacs equipped with Fusion Drives in 2021. Really cool tech for the time, but should've stayed in the 2010s
- teruakohatu 2y agoI did realise those were still being sold only a few years ago. The overall concept still existing at filesystem level such as ZFS’ L2ARC, although this is a RAM heavy feature.
- cedws 2y agoChina is a country of over 1 billion people. It has advanced and surpassed many Western countries in the span of just 40 years. Trying to put a leash on them with sanctions is futile, hostile, and will only increase their determination. We should be trying to find common ground and working with them instead of fabricating another boogeyman for no reason.
- HideousKojima 2y ago>We should be trying to find common ground and working with them Why should we, after what they did to the rights and freedoms of the people of Hong Kong?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- GeoAtreides 2y ago+500 social credits Indeed, why not find common ground with a totalitarian regime that conducts genocides and violently suppresses democracy and dissent take it from an old man that was born in eastern europe in another totalitarian regime, I've seen it in practice, I've seen the horrors behind closed doors: appeasement never works and only prolongs the suffering of the people.
- cedws 2y agoI hate to make a whataboutism argument, but the US is no angel either.
- cameldrv 2y agoHas it ever been revealed what Amazon is using to back Glacier. I had heard a lot of speculation including some sort of custom optical disk. Anyone know?
- rasz 2y agoChinese manufactured SSDs all use YMTC NAND and have serious problem with data retention. https://goughlui.com/2023/10/10/psa-ssds-with-ymtc-flash-prone-to-failure-check-your-ssds/ https://goughlui.com/2023/10/10/psa-ssds-with-ymtc-flash-pro... Tape might be a bodge to make product usable in enterprise.
- teleforce 2y agoI'm not sure why people still need tape storage or hybrid SSD and tape storage, is it because of banking financial transactions recording requirements since the SSD storage now has similar or better storage capacity? The reported storage size for the hybrid MED is 72TB and Micron now has 60 TB for single SSD drive [1]. Huawei has even higher storage capacity with reported 128 TB in a single SSD drive [2]. [1] Micron launches 60TB PCIe gen5 SSD with 12GB/s read speeds: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42122434 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42122434 [2] Huawei unveils its OceanStor A800 AI-specific storage solution; announces 128TB high-capacity SSD: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/huawei-unveils-its-oceanstor-a800-ai-specific-storage-solution-announces-128tb-high-capacity-ssd/ https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/huawei-unveils-it...
- zamadatix 2y agoSize per dingus is somewhat irrelevant to the use case: what's it matter if you buy 10 things that take up a rack or 20 things that take up a rack - how much did it cost to store all of your data at the speed you needed? Modern tape still has extremely good $/TB. If you have a LOT (and I don't just mean a fews 100s of TB) of data you need to keep but don't need to be able to access all of it constantly then tape can still save you a metric boatload of money on TCO vs SSD or HDD. Dual tier systems are for when a small amount of that data may be hot at any given time (like you say, financial often has a lot of active data in a pool of tons of inactive data they can't throw out. Medical is another example). Rather than manual manage this you just run a 2 tier system that automatically bumps things in and out of high $$$, high performance storage banks to low $, high capacity storage banks transparently.
- mcalacinar2021 2y ago[dead]