Massive Storage with Tape-Based Technology for Cloud Environments
Tape technology is undergoing a renaissance. The latest tape recording-density demonstration at the Zurich Research Laboratory established the feasibility to reach 317 Gb/in2 in products towards the end of the decade. This talk uncovers some of the technical innovation in both the media and drive behind this demonstration, comparing the density outlook to that of HDDs. Beyond hardware-level innovation, this talk outlines the extensions to Swift object storage to accommodate high-latency media that will be introduced on top of Spectrum Scale/Archive in the Fenix archival data repositories used by the ICEI (Interactive Computing E-Infrastructure) partners. Furthermore, the architecture of storage solutions such as Spectrum Scale/Archive is contrasted with that of HPSS, which introduced a new capability of Cloud Storage Broker. Finally, with the growing adoption of tape by cloud Hyperscalers, together with the availability of key HPC components such as Spectrum Scale and Spectrum LSF, the potential of a seamless operation in hybrid and multi-cloud setups becomes always more attractive for HPC, starting with capacity bursting.