![]() ![]() The Oak Ridge teams regularly push those computations to a tape drive where it writes data on thousands of magnetic cartridges that are then placed by robotic arms in slots for safekeeping and later access. These supercomputers primarily run off more than 50,000 spinning disks that service user requests immediately. “We build these massive storage systems that are bleeding edge, and when you build a bleeding edge system, you are going to bleed,” said Dustin Leverman, a Storage Team Lead for the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility.“We basically build these things for performance and capacity, but reliability, even though we strive for that as well, isn’t something that can be guaranteed.” With such a large computational input and output of data, Oak Ridge relies on a hybrid data storage system to best serve its multifaceted needs. Titan can compute more than 27,000 trillion calculations per second, and researchers utilize the supercomputer’s massive power to explore solutions for areas as diverse as biofuels, neurodegenerative diseases, and nuclear power. Its data systems uses disk and tape technology to help researchers make startling new discoveries. The Oak Ridge National Laboratory is home to two of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, Titan and Summit. This combined with the large amounts of data produced every second has driven tape back onto the world stage, re-establishing it as a viable option to augment more cutting edge data backup and storage technologies. Recent tape innovations have decreased its size and increased its storage capabilities. Research labs and tech giants like Google, Microsoft and Amazon are moving toward multiple data storage solutions that rely heavily on the cloud, which uses spinning hard drives and solid-state drives, along with magnetic tape, a material that dates back more than 60 years. “That cost money and space to store, so people got away from it at an everyday level, but…look at who has become interested in tape.” ![]() “There was a time when every small business had a tape backup or a server sitting in the closet with shelves of tape,” said Mike Kahn, a 40-plus year computer industry veteran with experience as an analyst and engineer. Tape isn’t something associated with IT modernization trends such as hyper-converged infrastructure or cloud native. Some wonder if tape can do the trick fast enough for our real-time, artificial intelligence-driven world and others even believe using tape is more energy efficient. However, the old magnetic tape that formed the core of those once-pervasive technologies is making a comeback as many CIOs and IT managers look to diversify their storage needs in the disk-driven world. Then hard drives and solid-state drives became the memory medium of choice because of their much faster retrieval speed and shrinking size. From the advent of the computing industry in the 1950s through the 1980s, tape dominated memory technology. VHS tapes and cassettes are no longer cutting-edge tech, and instead have become period props in movies to conjure up a world of retro cool. An entire generation has grown up without rewinding a home movie or recording the summer's Top 40 hits on cassettes. ![]()
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