This is from 2018, I'd be curious to hear if anything has changed in the past few years.
In 2018 I was running a consulting business helping customers with backup to tape, but even back then most customers were doing backup to a dedupe (magnetic disk) library like the HP StoreOnce, but then often copying that spooled-to-disk data to tape one per week or once per month.
Now (2021) the flavour-of-the-month is backing up to cloud storage (s3 or Azure blobstore), sometimes directly, sometimes as a copy from deduplication storage. This morning's email summary tells me that one of my customers has just recently stopped using their on-site tape library; I have a quote out for some work with another customer to decommission theirs and replace it with writing to a cloud-hosted provider.
So tape is still getting used (assuming that's what Deep Glacier actually is), but it isn't owned by the customer. But if you are backing up to Google's blob storage, then no, it isn't tape, it's just magnetic storage again, just in low-speed access sections of disk.
The product I was working (DataProtector) has gone through a bit of churn as it changed hands from HP to Microfocus, so this could cloud the numbers a bit.
They both happen to be similar in price, but if the density gap grew by 3x then suddenly tape would be more expensive and only used for certain types of archival.
Not really. If you compare the current best tapes and hard drives, the hard drives store exactly the same amount per cubic centimeter. If you look at just the 10cm by 10cm part with the platters, and compare it to the 10cm by 10cm tape cartridge, the hard drive is fitting more data into less space. Once LTO-9 is available then it will win the first comparison but it will be just about tied for the second comparison.
> If the density gap grew, magnetics tapes will try to put more tape in a single enclosure, like HDDs try to put more disk in a single enclosure.
You can only fit so much more tape in the same box. They've already been increasing the tape length as much as is reasonable, but from LTO-3 to LTO-9 it's less than a 50% increase. Much like hard drives have managed to fit in a couple extra platters.
Comparing a 12 TB tape with an 18 TB 3.5" HDD, the volume of the cartridge is about a half or less, so the tape still has better density.
Moreover the tape cartridge is many times lighter, if you carry in your pocket a tape cartridge vs a 3.5" HDD, the difference is very significant. You would not notice the tape cartridge, while the HDD would be like having a stone in your pocket.
Experimental tapes have already been demonstrated at volumic densities much better than what HDDs hope to achieve in the future.
The volume of a tape is very close to 60% of a hard drive. So 12TB tape and 20TB drive are very close. If we use 18TB then it's still close.
But I wasn't even making an argument about the current tech. I was talking about if things were nudged just a bit. If we go back to imagining the world where the huge areal density gap is made slightly larger, then hard drives would crush tapes in both price and density. Despite tapes having a far bigger working area.
So the analysis is not "simply" that tapes have a far bigger working area. If it was, we'd have hundreds of terabytes in a tape right now.
> Moreover the tape cartridge is many times lighter, if you carry in your pocket a tape cartridge vs a 3.5" HDD, the difference is very significant. You would not notice the tape cartridge, while the HDD would be like having a stone in your pocket.
That's such a niche use it would barely affect sales. Effectively nobody carries around pocket tapes, because if you can afford a drive then you have stacks and stacks of tapes.
> Experimental tapes have already been demonstrated at volumic densities much better than what HDDs hope to achieve in the future.
That's cool but I'll wait to see when/if they're practical to make into a product, and whether something else has come along to make both of them blush.