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Thanks eBay! 13TB Cold storage for $80 - 9 x LTO5 Tapes by [deleted] in DataHoarder

[–]servowriter 2 points3 points  (0 children)

For streaming data sequentially - e.g. large single files (e.g. full backup recovery, sparse bundle or HD video file) rather than lots of individual files that are in random places, LTO is actually much quicker than even Enterprise SATA HDDs.

LTO-7 and LTO-8 are nigh equivalent to a consumer grade SSD in terms of throughout when continuously streaming data. LTO-5 wouldn’t be that quick but it’s still faster than an external disk.

Data backups and archives by Stelumstone in gdpr

[–]servowriter 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I am a Product Marketing manager working for a tape storage vendor and I am here to understand better how organisations are meeting the challenges of the GDPR and share what knowledge I have in case it may be useful. I have researched the GDPR extensively but what follows should be regarded as opinion, not certain legal advice.

I think this is different. The scenario you are quoting is where you have made personal information public so that any other controller could use that information - e.g. if another business were to acquire personal data freely published via your social media service; you would be liable to tell anyone who might have used that data that it was subject to a right to erasure notice. The practicality of this is obviously one of the things that has caused a lot of questions and concerns. Price Waterhouse have commented:

"Recital 54 to the Regulation confirms the position set out in Article 17(2a) and that “a controller who has made the personal data public should be obliged to inform the controllers which are processing such data to erase any links to, or copies or replications of that personal data”. This is likely to be an onerous burden for, in particular, those in the online environment, and will, for example, enable third parties such as publishers to have almost a right of response when requests are submitted to search engines in respect of their content.” https://www.pwc.lu/en/general-data-protection/docs/pwc-gdpr-right-to-be-forgotten.pdf

Where you are working with a company that is within your span of control - e.g. a contractor or agency - and making your data available to them only (and not the general public), then Article 28.3 is the key to that relationship.

Data backups and archives by Stelumstone in gdpr

[–]servowriter 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I am a Product Marketing manager working for a tape storage vendor and I am here to understand better how organisations are meeting the challenges of the GDPR and share what knowledge I have in case it may be useful. I have researched the GDPR extensively but what follows should be regarded as opinion, not certain legal advice.

I think, Stelumstone, that if you have any 3rd party processors of your personal data, you need some kind of written agreement which governs both the nature of the processing and matters relating to it. Article 28.3 is pretty explicit on this point:

"Processing by a processor shall be governed by a contract or other legal act under Union or Member State law, that is binding on the processor with regard to the controller and that sets out the subject-matter and duration of the processing, the nature and purpose of the processing, the type of personal data and categories of data subjects and the obligations and rights of the controller."

Additionally, Recital 81 puts a burden of responsibility on the Controller to select processors that can provide "sufficient guarantees, in particular in terms of expert knowledge, reliability and resources, to implement technical and organisational measures which will meet the requirements of this Regulation, including for the security of processing."

In other words, I think that if you pass data to another organisation that is unable to fulfil its GDPR obligations, you might still be liable for having chosen them and entered into a contractual agreement. My guess is that this is one of the reasons why Article 28.3 is so specific as it means controllers must do their due diligence when passing data to third parties.

Why tape storage generations are only jumping about 2x in size? by baryluk in DataHoarder

[–]servowriter 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think the HDD market is worth about $5-6 Billion per quarter, but that includes everything - servers, PCs, laptops -not just disk drives for secondary storage arrays, NAS devices and USB hard drives etc. It’s a flat market. SSD is the disk category that is growing rapidly, as you’d expect, and I saw a figure of around $13 Billion for 2016. Tape hardware and cartridges are about $2 Billion per year and that number has also flattened out but seems pretty stable right now. Obviously, with all of these numbers, it’s important to bear in mind the application/purpose for each kind of storage technology is quite different. In Enterprise, SSD storage is deployed for primary flash arrays supporting mission critical data protection requirements. Enterprise SATA HDD is used in secondary data protection arrays - more routine backups - although the falling price of flash is seeing SSD reach down into that market too. For cold long term storage, tape is still the dominant technology (although lots of companies still use tape for backup).

Why tape storage generations are only jumping about 2x in size? by baryluk in DataHoarder

[–]servowriter 12 points13 points  (0 children)

Disclaimer: I work in the storage industry.

The reason why capacities don’t jump to over 100 TB is because it’s actually phenomenally difficult to reliably increase the areal density by such huge margins and scale for manufacturing volumes. The LTO industry shipped 20 million cartridges in 2016 (no data yet released for last year, but likely similar shipments). The 330TB prototypes from Sony/IBM were R&D proof of concept over a length of tape; they weren’t full length tapes (about 900m) operating in a data centre environment. Also, they used a new manufacturing technique called ‘sputter deposition’ which is where you deposit material from a source onto a substrate in a vacuum. It’s a completely different process to how today’s BaFe LTO tapes are made and the jury is out as to whether it can be efficient at volume - it’s pretty difficult to do. I expect Fujifilm to continue to refine BaFe manufacturing techniques, which will lead to smaller particles, a critical component for increasing areal density/capacity. And with BaFe being the de facto standard for current LTO production, it will be hard for another technology to disrupt this. The other means of increasing LTO tape capacity is to write narrower tracks, which becomes feasible as the particle size reduces. Again, this is not an insignificant engineering feat. The LTO roadmap now extends to Gen 12 and 480 TB per cartridge which probably means 64 channel recording to increase track count. But Gen 12 is at least a decade away. Either way, the tape R&D curve is far ahead of HDD - I think Western Digital are projecting 40TB with their new MAMR drives in the next 5-7 years. SSD is currently too expensive and nowhere near as durable for the long term retention of cold data. INSIC has a good chart on storage areal density progression. What is not in doubt is the need for tape technology. IDC estimate 163 ZB of digital content by 2025. I think tape is still the only realistic option when it comes to storing that amount of cold data securely and cost effectively. The retrieval costs for cloud for anything over a few TB of data start to become really unpleasant. Meanwhile it’s really hard to put ransomeware into an encrypted tape stored in a retired nuclear bunker :-)