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back to article HP breaks ranks: Foresees data archiving on Flash

An unearthed HP presentation session shows HP is envisaging cold data storage, archiving, using flash. Here’s the TB4642 - Enabling the flash transformed data centre - session description extract; What will soon further ramp the adoption of flash are the superior storage densities offered by solid state drives as they expand …

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  1. the spectacularly refined chap

    For marketroid values of "archival"

    Everyday use of the term means something I can save to, stick it on the shelf for 15 years and then say "Oh, I need to refer back to that" and have a better than evens chance of being able to actually read it. I don't think that is what they mean here.

    It seems that every time flash begins to get anywhere near the level of reliability needed for that kind of role they jack up the capacity and lose everything they have gained. Perhaps more so - you could buy EEPROMs with 40 year retention guarantees since at least the early 80s. These days flash manufacturers seem to think they are doing you a service guaranteeing even five. Multi-terabyte flash drives are still a couple of generations off (at least in cost effective form) so it isn't even as if they are suggesting going back to tried and trusted tech.

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    1. Lusty
      Reply Icon

      Re: For marketroid values of "archival"

      You'd be right apart from the bit you're ignoring which is that the medium is NEVER considered reliable in long term archival. Tape archives are re-cycled every 5 years to make sure the data is there. Tape makes this process a right PITA too because some junior IT person needs to move them about unless there is a room sized robot to do the work, and even then replacement tapes and cleaning tapes need loading etc.

      With Flash, the logistics are somewhat better. You can re-cycle every week if you like because everything is always online. Flash drives don't require cleaning like tape drives do, and when the capacity goes up you can usually put the new drive into the old slot whereas with tape you need to change the tape drive to use higher densities.

      People who think archiving is write and forget on any medium are generally not trusted with data more valuable than lolcat pictures!

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      1. jabuzz
        Reply Icon

        Re: For marketroid values of "archival"

        Funny the archive life on the side of my LTO tapes says 30 years. You probably want to shift the data onto newer tapes sooner because of issues with tape and drive compatibility, so if your data is on LTO3 you probably want to move them to LTO6 in the next few years. That said I did a several hundred TB LTO1 to LTO4 migration five years ago. Anyone doing large scale archiving should have a tape robot so they can just load the new tapes, set the software off and forget about it. Took several months but so what.

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        1. Lusty
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          Re: For marketroid values of "archival"

          The fact that it took several months is the reason it's done so rarely. As I said, with SSD that process wouldn't take anywhere near as long and could be an ongoing background process to ensure the data is always fresh, therefore the security of data is potentially much better on SSD.

          Writing 30 years on the side of a tape box does not guarantee that the data will last 30 years on that tape, it simply states that the data might last 30 years. People rewrite their tapes because their data is valuable, not always to move to a new format. The only way to know your data is good is to read and write it regularly.

          Since we have no data on how long static information lasts in SSD yet I find it odd that people are arguing against it. SSD dies due to write cycles, and for archiving even if we rewrite all of the data every week those cycles won't run out for decades, and given the lifespan of computer hardware I suspect they would be replaced once a decade just to reduce power consumption if nothing else.

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          1. Anonymous Coward
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            Anonymous Coward

            Re: For marketroid values of "archival"

            As I said, with SSD that process wouldn't take anywhere near as long and could be an ongoing background process to ensure the data is always fresh, therefore the security of data is potentially much better on SSD.

            Way to make tape look cheap and reliable, wearing out flash drives by constantly writing to them.

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          2. Anonymous Coward
            Reply Icon
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: For marketroid values of "archival"

            Or to put it another way:

            How much does each and every tape in your archive solution add to the maintenance charge of that archive solution?

            How much do you think changing those tapes to flash drives (which you intend to write to constantly (for data refreshing)) will add to your archive solution maintenance costs?

            Don't let me put you off, I work in a company where you paying more for us to do bread and butter work is a good thing. In fact maybe I should mention this new and improved archiving idea to my boss. The thoughts of an ever increasing income stream from the ever increasing number of flash drives coming on to contract (for holding the every increasing amount of archive data) will no doubt make his weekend.

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      2. the spectacularly refined chap
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        Re: For marketroid values of "archival"

        You'd be right apart from the bit you're ignoring which is that the medium is NEVER considered reliable in long term archival. Tape archives are re-cycled every 5 years to make sure the data is there.

        But that cuts both ways: if you have a medium where the data is expected to last 15-20 years you may legitimately decide to copy the data every five. If your medium is expected to no more than 6-7 years you are going to copy every two. The reliability of the medium is a critical consideration to any properly managed archive: ignoring it is a badly managed archive no matter how much effort goes into it.

        You need also to realise that needlessly copying data can cause just as many issues as letting the media decay to intelligibility, yes, even with e.g. read-after-write verification or even checksumming. That's why the properly managed archives reject "copy every X years" as hopelessly amateurish in favour of a statistical random sampling approach.

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  2. Arctic fox
    Unhappy

    What is the world coming to?

    You actually referred to FarceBook in an article of this kind?

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    1. Anonymous Coward
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      Anonymous Coward

      Re: What is the world coming to?

      No, the article refers to Facebook. I don't believe FarceBook was mentioned at all.

      Apologies if you are genuinely dyslexic.

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      1. Arctic fox
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        Thumb Down

        If you are going to do irony AC (of course, what else would you be).........

        ........I suggest you work on it before you post. That was, to say the least of it, somewhat laboured.

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  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Assuming the cost curves continue they way they have been...

    Just because we've been getting x% more bits per dollar every year for the past couple decades with flash versus the smaller value of x for tape, doesn't mean it will continue that way long enough for flash to become cheaper.

    Flash has to beat hard drives first, then we can worry about it besting tape and taking over as the "one true format". Considering that people keep trying to push it out of the way for new technologies like PCM and MRAM that have been 5-10 years away from replacing flash for past decade, it is hard to project far enough into the future to where flash is a preferred archive medium to tape.

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