- US GSA has put down 14,000 ties and an unknown amount of tape drive
- The data was moved to a new, unknown media platform that appears to have worm functions
- US GSA claims to save $ 1 million. Per year (or about $ 70 per year per tape).
The US Government’s Efficiency (DOGE) has posted on X (formerly known as Twitter) with boasting the IT team in the US Gernal Services Administration (GSA) “Equally saved $ 1 million a year by converting 14,000 magnetic tapes (70 years old technology for information storage) to permanent digital items.”
The comment does not include any context of what tape technology was used (wheels for wheels or cartridge), how long it took to transfer the data from the bands and what the new storage technology replaces the tape is.
The word “permanently” makes us think it is a “write once, read many” solution (worm) where the data once written cannot be changed.
In addition, the hint of how old the technology (70 years old) leaves us to guess whether the actual platform is replaced is 70 years old (very unlikely), or whether the technology it is based is 70 years old.
(Ed: As a reminder, the first hard drive launched in 1956 and the first nand (the basic component of SSD) appeared in 1987).
Using old technology in itself makes perfect sense in many mission -critical situations: Why change something that isn’t broken?
The US strategic automated command and control system or SACCs, which is the US nuclear power’s internal communication system, only got rid of 8-inch floppy drive in 2019 because it worked very well until then.
And 65-year-old programming language cobol is still used by thousands of major organizations around the world and handled at the last number of $ 3 trillion worth of transactions every single day (or more than $ 1 quadrillion dollars a year).
So ties have a future in 2025?
You are betting! Tape is still very relevant today to large organizations and hyperscalers. It may all have disappeared from the consumer market, but it is the only media that has proven long life in scale.
Linear tape top (LTO) is the most important format on the market and is backed by tech giants such as Fuji, Sony, HPE and IBM, hardly a platform that disappears overnight.
The LTO organization, which oversees LTO, has published a roadmap for the next 15 years with the expectation that tape capacity will increase from an original capacity of 18TB to up to 576TB, an increase of 32x.
Pipedream? Well, IBM and Fujifilm demonstrated a band prototype with a capacity of 580 TB back in … December 2020. So the chances of a 576TB ribbon will start when market conditions dictate it is very high.
Apart from its reliability, ties are also far cheaper than any other media, consumer does not consume power and can be aired to improved protection against ransomware attacks.
You can also physically make it worm), which makes it only read, and magnetic bands are impervious to natural and man -made EMP (electromagnetic heart rate).
Forget SSD (for expensive) and optical disks (limited shelf life), right now there is only one winner when it comes to data archiving, cold storage (or plans to save 25,000 movies), and that’s good OL’s tape.
However, there are competitors on the horizon of ties. Cerabyte, a startup supported by a CIA -proxy and clean storage, plans a 10PB cartridge that lasts for 5000 years. Microsoft has been working with Project Silica for almost 10 years now, while DNA storage has the potential to increase the entire data storage market. Other candidates include 5D memory crystal, rare ground crystal, fluo-ray disk,
However, they are all untested and will take years before reaching market status. So despite the fact that tape is 70-year-old, it is a Septuagenerian that is alive and kicks ass that drives 30PB libraries and is very much looking forward to becoming 100.
Techradar Pro has contacted five organizations that are of great interest in digital tape technologies for comment.
