TV Technology Europe
Fresh
breakthroughs in tape, disc, film and glass herald a new era of
eternal data archiving. If employed intelligently, there’s no
reason we won’t be able to preserve Keeping Up With Kardashians for
our great-great grandchildren. Adrian Pennington reports.
Many
in the industry are concerned about how to store their data over the
next year or two. But how do we preserve our data for the next
decade? Or the next century? Or beyond?
In
Egypt, around 196 BC, someone carved an honours list in three
languages onto a slab of granodiorite. The mundane text was
rediscovered in 1799 and finally decrypted to provide the essential
key to modern understanding of ancient Egyptian civilization. The
Rosetta Stone is the perfect database. It has physically lasted for
centuries and its information can be read without any new technology.
If only the quest to find an archive solution for digital media were
as simple.
The
world is overflowing with digital data, and the digital universe is
doubling every two years according to IDC. A share of this digital
universe has value in the long term so what are the options?
In
the digital age, tape has proved surprisingly durable. Anyone who has
seen the film The
Big Easy
will know how easy it is to put a magnet next to tape and erase its
contents. Tape is subject to degradation and bit drop out over time,
and while industry standard LTO gets around this by recording data
without the revolving head drum used on video tape, the system needs
manual intervention every few years in order to migrate the data
stored on it to the latest generation.
The
new generation of LTO-7 tape, manufactured by Fujifjlm, is composed
of Barium Ferrite, a medium with magnetic properties which means the
tape does not deteriorate, and it gives tape headends a longer
lifespan. Plus the capacity has jumped from 2.5TB to 6TB.
“It's
like a whole new format,” says Fuji's commercial manager Richard
Alderson. “Nothing has been done like this in the past and we are
the only manufacturer who can provide gen-7 tape.” Which is
increasingly important given the move to UHD.
“A
single movie at 4K can need over a petabyte and as the data sets get
bigger, customers are realising that tape is far safer and more
reliable than disc as a storage medium,” explains David McKenzie,
storage and archive specialist, Oracle.
Oracle's
StorageTek division is readying a new enterprise version of its tape
drive called T10K for release early 2017. This will have capacity for
10-15TB. In addition Oracle is working with the team and the Diva
technology from Front Porch, the firm it acquired in September 2014.
Meanwhile LTO-8 with a projected 12.8TB capacity and 427MBps speed is
expected in three years.
“Tape
is far from dead. In fact it is a lot cheaper than disc. It is more
environmentally friendly and most important it is far less
corruptible. It's the reason why broadcasters like the BBC and Sky
choose to archive their programme catalogues on it.”
30
year optical disc
The
main alternative to LTO is optical disc, which, as McKenzie alludes
to, can drain power in order to keep the mechanism cool. Earlier this
year, Sony and Panasonic launched new optical disc-based storage
systems for data centres. Sony's Everspan can store 181 Petabytes for
100 years. Four systems can be ganged together to offer 724PB of
total storage. To grasp that, if you were to envision one bit of data
as the equivalent to one second, then 1PB would equal 285 million
years.
Sony
says Everspan is able to transfer 18GB of data per second, “outpacing
the best performance of tape libraries and archival drive platforms.
Because of the durability of optical discs, unlike other storage
media, users are expected to never need to migrate data.”
The
initiative is led by Frank Frankovsky whose start-up company Optical
Archive was acquired by Sony last year. Previously, Frankovsky led a
project for Facebook to store the social network's burgeoning data
and helped Panasonic develop something along similar lines called
freeze-ray. It seems that Facebook is hedging its bets by deploying
both Sony and Panasonic variants of Frankovsky's system.
Frankovsky
says the goal is to make it possible for customers to store
everything for as long as they wish in a low-touch, low-cost optical
library. “We’re finally bringing a product to market that will
make tape obsolete technology,” he says.
The
Everspan media developed by Panasonic and Sony is the same as used in
Sony's next version of its Optical Disc Archive (ODA) unveiled at NAB
2016. A single cartridge has doubled in capacity to 3.3 TB. ODA is
designed for use in near-line applications, deep archive storage or
disaster recovery systems. Hardware configurations range from
stand-alone to large, scalable robotic archive systems. The main
components of ODA Generation 2 include: a stand-alone USB drive unit
(ODS-D280U), an 8 GB fiber channel library drive unit (ODS-D280F),
for use in robotic systems, and the Optical Disc Archive media
cartridge (ODC3300R).
100
year metal alloy tape
While
LTO tape has a lifespan of 30 years, DOTS (Digital Optical Technology
System) stores digital data onto metal alloy tape and is claimed to
be archival for 100 years. Originated by Kodak and developed since
2008 by Group 47, the technology's software converts a digital file
into a visual representation of the data. With sufficient
magnification, one can actually see the digital information.
Its
specification – the 'Rosetta Leader' - calls for microfiche-scale
human readable text at the beginning of each tape with instructions
on how the data is encoded and instructions on how to actually
construct a reader (it even resembles the Rosetta Stone – see
image). Because the information is visible, as long as cameras and
imaging devices are available, the information will always be
recoverable, the company says.
500
year film
However,
the only technology which has proven it can last a century is film.
What's more it has the valuable benefit of easy reading simply by
shining a light through the negative. Yet celluloid is fragile, some
types are notoriously flammable, and it’s expensive despite the
fact that the bulk of film stock made by Kodak and 35mm scans made
from the material are now for the archive market.
With
Fraunhofer and Norner, Norway's Piql has devised a way to use the
preservation qualities of photosensitive film combined with the
accessibility of being part of a standard IT infrastructure. Its
turnkey solution includes all equipment and processes needed for
writing, storing and retrieving files and is claimed to last 500
years. A high-precision piqlWriter records digital files and related
metadata onto photosensitive film. Checksums are applied to verify
the integrity of the data. Forward Error Correction is used for
controlling errors, making it possible to fully retrieve even damaged
or corrupted data.
“Both
digital and visual storage of data is possible,” according to the
company. “This means users can select between storing data in
computer readable digital format (binary codes), or as text or
images. It can even combine the two, allowing users to get visual
previews of the data.
It
provides a self-documenting preservation master containing all
information needed for decoding and understanding the preserved data.
The source code of the decoding software is open and written in text
format on the reel.
A
billion years and more
Scientists
at the University of Southampton have gone way further. Using glass,
scientists from the university’s Optoelectronics Research Centre
have developed the recording and retrieval processes of five
dimensional (5D) data, which is calculated to survive for billions of
years.
The
glass isn't the common or garden double glazed variety. The data is
recorded via an unbelievably fast laser, with pulses of light fired
at 280 quadrillionths of a second onto self-assembled nanostructures
created in discs of fused quartz.
A
file is written in three layers of nanostructured dots separated by
five micrometres (one millionth of a metre) and in five dimensions:
the size and orientation in addition to the three dimensional
position of these nanostructures.
It
sounds like science fiction and has already been christened as the
‘Superman memory crystal’, yet Hitachi also announced a similar
etched glass data storage solution in 2012.
Cultural
heritage documents like the Bible and Magna Carta have already been
fused in 5D (see image, top) and the team are looking for partners to
commercialise the technology.
The
medium permits thermal stability up to 1000°C and virtually
unlimited lifetime at room temperature and can be read by combination
of optical microscope and a polariser, similar to that found in
Polaroid sunglasses. Just don't drop it.
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