Thread by @SciTech_Cat

At @IBMResearch in Zurich, scientists are reinventing tape technology - combining it with cloud computing.

Remember - it all started with tape, but then it kinda sunk into oblivion.  1/10

THREAD

Old cassette players, anyone? I still remember my bright pink walkman w Michael Jackson tape in it... back in 1991 or thereabouts. I was 11 then.

Ask my 11 y.o. son what tape is though, & u'll get this:🤨 followed by🙄 BUT: tape is making a comeback! 2/10

Well, when you store stuff in the CLOUD, it doesn't literally get saved in the thin air. No - your data that's in the cloud is typically kept on hard drives in data centres. They use tons of energy and data continues to grow exponentially (yes, those cat videos count too)  3/10

Cloud is vulnerable to hacking attacks, though. And also, hard drive technology is getting too expensive - b/c we are creating data at a much faster rate than we can afford to store it with hard drives. So - enter TAPE. Or re-enter, I should say. 4/10

When data is kept on hard drives, it's accessible straight away - you don't want to wait 30 sec for your FB pic to load, right? With tape, it does take that long - a robot in a data centre has to actually get the tape out, put it in & fast frwd/rewind it to the right place. 5/10

But a lot of data is cold data, so those archival pix & info that you don't access on a daily basis, & it's if that takes a bit longer to load. So that's why giant tech companies - well, cloud providers - are all turning to tape to store their data 6/10

And a hard drive only lasts about 3 years, so soon my reckoning is that most if not all companies will move to tape tech for cloud storage. Unless they are ok to pay silly money for hard drive tech when the amount of data is exploding. I doubt that. 7/10

Here at the IBM lab, I saw cartridges as small as the palm of your hand that hold 20TB of data - whereas a hard drive has 16 TB capacity. 8/10

And while we can't scale hard drive tech much anymore, we can scale tape tech easily - and IBM Research folks say they'll have cartridges with 330 TB capacity within a decade! That means you can store the equivalent text of 330 million 📚 9/10

So yeah, maybe soon it'll be time to introduce my 11-year-old son to that pink walkman I used to love so much! (Xmas ideas hmmm 😀🎄)

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