- US GSA has decommissioned 14,000 tapes and an unknown amount of tape drives
- The data was moved to a new, unknown media platform that appears to have WORM capabilities
- US GSA claims to save $1M per year (or about $70 per year per tape).
The US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has posted on X (formerly known as Twitter) boasting the IT team of the US Gerneral Services Administration (GSA) “just saved $1M per year by converting 14,000 magnetic tapes (70 yr old technology for information storage) to permanent modern digital records.”
The comment doesn’t include any context as to what tape technology was used (reel-to-reel or cartridge), how long it took to transfer the data from the tapes and what the new storage technology replacing the tape is.
The word “permanent” leads us to believe that it is a “Write Once, Read Many” solution (WORM) where once written, the data cannot be modified.
In addition, the allusion to how old the technology (70 years old) leaves us to guess whether the actual platform being replaced is 70 years old (very unlikely) or whether the technology it is based on, is 70 years old.
(ed: As a reminder, the first hard drive launched in 1956 and the first NAND (the basic component of the SSD) appeared in 1987).
Using old technology in itself makes perfect sense in many mission critical situations: after all, why change something that’s not broken?
The US Strategic Automated Command and Control System or SACCS, which is the US nuclear force’s internal communication system only got rid of 8-inch floppy disk drives in 2019, because it worked very well till then.
And 65-year old programming language COBOL is still used by thousands of major organizations worldwide and at the last count, was handling $3 trillion dollars worth of transactions every single day (or more than $1 quadrillion dollars per year).
So does tape have a future in 2025?
You bet! Tape is still very much relevant to this day to large organizations and hyperscalers. It may have all but disappeared from the consumer market but it is the only media that has proven longevity at scale.
Linear Tape-Open (LTO) is the main format on the market and is backed by tech giants such as Fuji, Sony, HPE and IBM, so hardly a platform that will vanish overnight.
The LTO organisation, which oversees LTO, has published a roadmap for the next 15 years with the expectation that tape capacity will rise from a native capacity of 18TB to up to 576TB, a 32x increase.
Pipedream? Well, IBM and Fujifilm demoed a tape prototype with a capacity of 580TB back in … December 2020. So chances that a 576TB tape will launch when market conditions dictate it, are very high.
Other than its reliability, tape is also far cheaper than any other media, doesn’t consume power and can be airgapped for enhanced protection against ransomware attacks.
You can also physically make it WORM), which makes it read only and magnetic tapes are impervious to natural and man-made EMP (Electromagnetic Pulse).
Forget about SSD (too expensive) and optical disks (limited shelf life), right now, there’s only one winner when it comes to data archiving, cold storage (or planning to store 25,000 movies) and that’s good ol’ tape.
There are competitors on the horizon for tape though. Cerabyte, a startup backed by a CIA proxy and Pure Storage, is planning a 10PB cartridge that last for 5000 years. Microsoft has been working on Project Silica for almost 10 years now while DNA storage has the potential to upend the entire data storage market. Other candidates include 5D memory crystal, rare-earth crystal, fluo-ray discs,
They are all unproven though and will take years before reaching go to market status. So despite tape being 70-year old, it is a septuagenerian that is alive and kicking ass, powering 30PB libraries and very much looking forward to turning 100.
TechRadar Pro has contacted five organizations that have major interest in digital tape technologies for comment.
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