IBM's recent storage advancement underscores the enduring success of tape technology, six decades after its inception.
IBM and FUJIFILM Corporation have made significant strides in magnetic tape storage technology, enabling higher capacities and improved performance that are beneficial for big data, cloud computing, and off-premise data applications.
Their collaboration has led to numerous technology improvements, including a dramatic increase in the precision of controlling the position of the read-write heads. This precision has allowed the development of a new, advanced prototype tape, achieving a record-breaking areal recording density of 123 billion bits of uncompressed data per square inch.
This breakthrough represents the equivalent of a 220 terabyte tape cartridge, which could fit in the palm of your hand. This is a 22-fold improvement over IBM's current enterprise class tape product and an 88-fold improvement over the latest industry-standard magnetic tape product, the LTO6 cartridge.
The enhanced write field head technology, a key component of this development, allows the use of much finer barium ferrite (BaFe) particles. Alongside advanced servo control technologies, enhanced write field head technology, and signal-processing algorithms for the data channel, IBM researchers have been able to achieve this impressive milestone.
The increased density and performance of magnetic tape storage make it suitable for off-premise applications like archival storage, backup, and disaster recovery, where cost per terabyte and long-term reliability matter more than rapid access times. This positively impacts big data and cloud computing infrastructures by enabling large-scale, cost-effective data retention and compliance with data governance policies without excessively burdening expensive primary storage tiers.
Companies leveraging technologies such as the LTO-9 standard—an evolution in which IBM and FUJIFILM have been key contributors—offer tape drives with native capacities of around 18TB and compressed capacities up to 45TB, along with transfer rates reaching 300 MB/s. Such advancements address the exponential growth of big data and the demands of cloud providers by providing highly scalable and energy-efficient storage alternatives to disk-based systems.
IBM Research scientists are also exploring the integration of tape technology with cloud object storage systems such as OpenStack Swift, further expanding the potential applications of this technology. ETH Zurich, a leading international university based in Switzerland, is already using IBM tape technology for central data back-up and restore services.
According to IT analyst firm Coughlin Associates, more than 500 exabytes of data reside in tape storage systems, underscoring the importance of this technology in the storage landscape. The record announced today represents a potential increase in capacity compared with IBM's first tape drive product of 110,000,000 times, highlighting the significant progress made in magnetic tape storage technology.
In summary, the advancements in magnetic tape technology by IBM and FUJIFILM directly facilitate the scalability and economic feasibility of managing huge datasets in modern cloud and big data contexts, making tape storage a vital component of current and future data center storage strategies.
- The advancements in data-and-cloud-computing-related applications, such as big data storage and management, cloud computing infrastructure, and off-premise data applications, are propelled by the breakthroughs in magnetic tape storage technology by IBM and FUJIFILM.
- The enhanced precision in magnetic tape storage technology, driven by the collaboration between IBM and FUJIFILM, brings about technology improvements that power the efficient and cost-effective data retention and compliance for big data and cloud computing infrastructures.
