IBM Researchers Push Tape Densities in the Lab

Anyone who thinks that tape technology is dead doesn’t know anything about data centers, and hasn’t felt the bile in their throats when a server crashes and all that is standing between themselves and a lot of grief is a set of data that they have thoughtfully backed up on tape. Tape matters, and it will continue to do so, and that is why IBM continues to do research to advance the magnetic tape technology it helped create decades ago.

Researchers at IBM’s Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California, last week reported that they have created a tape technology that was capable of storing data at a density of 6.67 billion bits per square inch. That works out to be about 15 times as dense as the current state-of-the-art tape cassettes used in the IT industry. IBM researchers worked with partner Fuji Film of Japan in the technology demonstration.

By showing tape can get denser and stay on the price/performance curve that tape technologies have been following (like chips and memory circuits) for the past several decades, IBM says that within about five years it will be able to deliver a tape cartridge that holds about 8 terabytes of data in something about the size of today’s LTO tape cartridge. That’s about 20 times the density of the LTO-3 tapes. And, because IBM press people are silly, they did the standard conversion to books to make this number sound more “real” to non-techies, and I would be remiss if I didn’t report it to you for a chuckle. “Eight terabytes of data is equivalent to the text in 8 million books, which would require 57 miles of bookshelves,” IBM’s statement read. As if any of us thought of data in terms of sheets or paper or books any more.

Let’s do some different math here and show you that 8 terabytes of data is nothing in a world with gigabyte email accounts, streaming media files, and high resolution graphics. An iPod with a 60 GB drive holds 15,000 songs or 25,000 electronic photos. (Yes, that is a lot of songs. My entire CD collection, which I have spent almost 20 years creating, has about 9,000 songs in it; I don’t have anywhere near 25,000 photos.) To put that 8 TB into a better perspective, such a future tape cartridge would be sufficient to archive of 136 of the current 60 GB iPods if they were full of songs. When you say it that way, it just doesn’t sound like a lot of data, now does it?