Month: September 2016
Data Archiving Architecture: Finding a Perfect Balance of Storage Mediums.
Data archiving has always been a challenge both for the enterprises and manufacturers of data storage solutions. The basic laws of thermodynamics tend to have the effect of deteriorating data storage capacity in the long run, so it is important to understand the needs of each individual data archiving project to be able to choose the right storage system based on the appropriate technology under the proper environmental conditions. That should be also combined with relevant migration and replication practices to improve the safety and accessibility for the extended periods of time.
The most common means of data archiving today are flash memory, hard disk drives, magnetic tape and optical discs. Data storage architects usually use one of these technologies, or their combinations, when designing their systems.
Let’s try and take a closer look at these technologies.
First consider flash memory in archiving. At the 2013 Flash Memory Summit Jason Taylor from Facebook, in a keynote speech, presented the idea of using really low endurance flash memory for a cold storage archive. According to Marty Czekalski of Seagate at the MSST conference, flash writing is best done at elevated temperatures while data retention and data disturb favor storage at lower temperatures. The JEDEC JESD218A endurance specification states that if flash power-off temperature is at 25 degrees C then retention is 101 weeks—that isn’t quite 2 years. So it appears conventional flash memory may not have good media archive life and should only be used for storing transitory data.
Hard disk drives are often used in active archives because the various hard disk drive arrays can be continually connected to the storage network, allowing relatively rapid access to content. Hard disk drive active archives can also be combined with flash memory to provide better overall system performance. However hard disk drives do not last forever – they can wear out with continued use and even if the power is turned off the data in the hard disk drive will eventually decay due to thermal erasure (again we run into the enemy of data retention, thermodynamics).
In practice, hard disk drive arrays have built in redundancy and data scrubbing to help retain data for a long period. It is probably good advice to assume that HDDs in an active archive will last only 3-5 years and will need to be replaced over time.
Less active archives where data is stored for longer periods of time will be interested in storage media that can retain the information stored on them for an extended period of time. There are two common digital storage media that are used for long term cold storage applications – magnetic tape and optical discs.
Let’s look at these two storage technologies and compare them for long term cold storage applications.
Magnetic tapes used for archiving come in half-inch tape cartridges. The popular formats used to day are the LTO format supported by the Ultrium LTO Program, the T10000 series tapes from Oracle/ StorageTek and the TS series enterprise tapes from IBM. Modern magnetic tapes have a storage life under low temperature/humidity storage conditions and low usage of several decades and currently native storage capacities per cartridges as high as 8.5 TB.
When not actively being written or read, magnetic tape cartridges can sit in a library system consuming no power. Digital magnetic tape is thus a good candidate for long-term data retention and has a long history of use in many industries for this application.
Optical storage has also been used for long-term data retention and environmental stress tests indicate that the latest generation of optical media should have an expected life-time of at least several decades. FalconMedia Century Archival discs are actually able to store data for hundreds of years, thanks to special gold and platinum reflective layers, that are used in their construction. At the Open Compute Project Summit in January 2014 Facebook, presented a 1 PB optical disc storage system prototype with 10,000 discs. When Facebook started the actual exploitation of the system it actually reduced company’s storage costs by 50% and the energy consumption by 80% compared to their previous HDD-based cold storage system.
Ken Wood from Hitachi Data Systems at the MSST Conference presented research results that proved hypothesis that the migration/remastering costs for 5 PB of content over 75 years is much less for an optical system with the media replaced every 50 years rather than more frequent tape and HDD replacement.
A lot of digital data has persistent value and so long term retention of that data is very important. In an Oracle talk at MSST they estimated that storage for archiving and retention is currently a $3B market, growing to over $7B by 2017. Several storage technologies can play a role in an archive system depending upon the level of activity expected in the archive. Flash memory can provide caching of frequently used or anticipated content to speed retrieval times while HDDs are often used for data that is relatively frequently accessed.
Magnetic tape and optical disks provide low cost, long-term inactive storage with additional latency for data access vs. HDDs due to the time to mount the media in a drive. Thus depending upon the access requirements for an archive it may be most effective to combine two or even three technologies to get the right balance of performance and storage costs. As the total content that we keep increases, these considerations will become more important to drive new generations of storage technologies geared toward protecting valuable content and bringing it to the future.
The Importance of Quality Control: Observations from Samsung Galaxy Note 7 Case
One of the world’s leading smartphone manufacturers recently got themselves in a tricky situation that is very hard to manage at the moment, both logistically and PR-wise.
Two weeks ago, Samsung had no other choice but to create one of the biggest global handset recalls in the world. This was caused by 35 registered cases of exploding phones, or phones catching fire during charging. Galaxy Note 7 was launched on August 19th, and as of today, nearly 2.5 million phones are to be returned to the manufacturer – a major drawback for the Korean technological giant, that severely undermines its effort to push its phone up the value chain.
It wouldn’t be such a big deal, but we all know about the so-called “dominoes effect”.
Other Samsung products, such as recently released Galaxy S7 Edge, and soon to be presented Galaxy Tab S3, are facing problems as well. Since all of them are assembled on the same factories as Note 7, consumers will no longer associate them with terms “trendy” or “reliable” (most likely, these terms will be substituted with “exploding batteries” and “poor quality” deep inside the consumers’ minds).
The US Federal Aviation Administration has already started discussions on the topic of whether to prohibit the in-flight usage of mobile devices. Samsung gets questioned every single day on whether the Note 8 model will be safe, there is always the chance that the Note 7 case will push FAA to prohibit the usage of mobile devices during flights.
It is truly regrettable what happened to Samsung; in the long run this failure can result in a major brand image decline with a further global sales drop, a mistake that will cost Korean giant a lot. This case brings us back to the production stage, one of the purposes of which is to avoid such negative outcomes via quality control and quality assurance.
Quality control emphasizes testing of products to uncover defects and reporting to management who make the decision to allow or deny a product release, whereas quality assurance attempts to improve and stabilize production (and associated processes) to avoid, or at least minimize, issues which may potentially lead to the defects in future.
Falcon Technologies International emphasizes the quality of its products and therefore allocates a large portion of its resources in quality control and quality assurance. For over a decade the company strives to deliver reliable and long lasting optical media to the market and so far the quality of its products is beyond doubt.
When it comes to data storage, it is important to keep in mind that a data carrier’s reliability is crucial for its integrity and longevity and this is why FTI ensures that every single disc produced by the factory is a storage device tailored to protect and store data with a 100% error-free rate.
Samsung’s battery failure is a good lesson to learn for everyone in the technology and consumer electronics market – it always better to spend more time and focus on quality control, rather then lose the track of things driven by the blind efforts to catch up with your competitors.
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DISCLAIMER: The above article is about Samsung case study which is used as an example of the importance of QC/QA procedures. It was published to stress out the importance of these processes. One of the core values of FTI is Quality and Reliability and we have used the Samsung Case to emphasize once again that FTI learns lessons from the other’s mistakes and it is one more argument in favour of proper QC and QA procedures which should be always on the top of any production company’s priority list.
Headphone Jack: Reliable Technology or a “Wired” Alien in the World of Wireless Technology?
People who are used to hooking headphones up to their smartphones could soon find themselves searching for a non-existent connector. Rumour had it for more than 6 months now, and finally it was confirmed to be true: Apple presented an all-new iPhone 7 last week, and guess what? Engineers from Apple’s home in Cupertino said “Fare thee well!” to the 3.5 mm audio jack connector.
Now, since Apple is undoubtedly the world’s leading smartphone manufacturer, all the other market players will follow this example and soon the era of wired headphones may be over (just like recent end of VHS tapes era).
However, the sad thing is, the headphone jack – is a very good connector. It’s a universal interface that can be still plugged into your smartphone, your tablet and computer, your TV, hi-fi, radio, Game Boy or console. And it has been used widely for decades, more or less replacing the larger 1/4-inch jacks (which dated from the 1870s, originally used for manual telephone exchange) since the 1960s for all but specialist applications, such as electric guitars and some more powerful amps.
As smartphones have become the primary music device for a whole generation and more, most headphones spend the majority of their time plugged into these pocket computers. But now the jack’s dominance is being contested.
Several smartphone manufacturers have started shipping handsets without 3.5 mm sockets even before Apple’s move with iPhone 7 last Wednesday. For example, Lenovo’s new modular Moto Z shrinks the headphone socket for a dongle that’s plugged into the relatively new USB-type C socket in the bottom. China’s LeEco also dumped the socket, while chip giant Intel is actively encouraging others to kill off the analogue 3.5mm socket in favour of USB-type C.
According to Android Authority Blog, moving from analogue to digital connector may be both positive and negative in certain aspects. Moreover, the article published on the news portal states that it is expected that both options will sit side by side in the market for the foreseeable future and it is still too early to say that 3.5 mm jack will be fully dumped as a technology.
Why would Apple and other smartphone manufacturers dump the handy, helpful, user-friendly headphone jack? There are several reasons. The Lightning port in the bottom of an iPhone is already capable of outputting audio, and is needed for power, so if one of the two has to go to save a little bit of space, the 3.5mm jack gets the boot.
Chief marketing officer of Jaybird (wireless headphones manufacturer), Rene Oehlerking is sure that the days of the analog headphone jack are over. He believes that this technology has always been like a ghost from the analogue past in the world of digital technology and it is exactly the same interface that used to be plugged into with famous Walkman players, that were first introduced back in 1979.
Even though there are different, sometimes even opposite opinions on the future of 3.5 mm audio jack interface, it is obvious that this technology will eventually reduce its presence on the mass market over the next 5 years. But there is absolutely no doubt, that it’s authority will stay untouched in music-recording and movie-production industries, where quality of sound monitoring and mastering is essential.
Very similar situation is with optical media. Realistically speaking, CDs and DVDs are gradually moving from mass-market to niche-industries, such as data archiving, sound and video production, etc. These industries still preserve commonly-considered “outdated” formats, since their reliability is under no question.
For example, video-production and music recording studios still tend to use high-end optical media, such as FalconMedia Premium Line, to store big volumes of sound and video materials. It is cheaper and safe, since optical media does not require any constant electricity supply and has a way more extended lifespan.
As a conclusion, it is not necessary to run after latest inventions and get the new technologies implemented immediately after their introduction. Sometimes old, but tried-and-true things happen to be way more reliable and safe.
Do’s and Don’ts in Optical Media Data Archiving.
We all have some data or information that we want to preserve for as long a period of time as possible: whether it is family home videos or photo albums, precious memories of the past, or something that has the magical ability to recreate the best moments of our lives. As we wrote in one of our previous blog articles, many of us still have our old video archives stored on VHS tapes. When it comes to the photographs, it is very often the same story: how many of you still remembers Grandma’s old photo-albums with black and white photographs in them?
In this article we will discuss a little more about the preservation of digital data using CDs and DVDs. We gathered some valuable guidelines from a number of sources including NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology), other DVD and CD manufacturers and data archiving specialists.
The consensus of opinions, based on accelerated lifetime testing conducted by specialists worldwide, is that a high quality archival grade CDs and DVDs, if properly handled and stored, should preserve data for at least 100 years. Some professional grade optical media like FalconMedia Century Archival with gold and platinum layers even suggest a lifetime as long as 300-500 years before the data becomes unreadable.
Of course, whether the hardware required to read a current CD or DVD will be around in 75 or 200 years is another matter. Most system today don’t have even the hardware to read 5.25″ floppy disks (which were common and popular 25 years ago). But in any case, the lifespan of optical media as a data storage medium is expected to be at least 4 times longer than that.
The key points here are that long life depends on using HIGH QUALITY archival DVDs and CDs and handling and storing them properly. The less you handle them the better, so for real archival use it is strongly recommended to make at least two copies. Put one away in storage under the conditions outlined below (vertical storage in a case under low temperature and low humidity conditions) and use one as your “working” copy.
THINGS TO DO:
- Handle discs by the outer edge or the center hole.
- Use a non solvent-based felt-tip permanent marker to mark the label side of the disc.
- Keep dirt or other foreign matter from the disc.
- Store discs upright (book style) in plastic cases specified for CDs and DVDs.
- Return discs to storage cases immediately after use.
- Leave discs in their packaging (or cases) to minimize the effects of environmental changes.
- Open a recordable disc package only when you are ready to record data on that disc.
- Store in a cool, dry, dark environment in which the air is clean.
- Remove dirt, foreign material, fingerprints, smudges, and liquids by wiping with a clean cotton fabric in a straight line from the center of the disc toward the outer edge.
- Use CD/DVD cleaning detergent, isopropyl alcohol or methanol to remove stubborn dirt or material.
- Check the disc surface before recording.
A standard jewel case is adequate for storage. In jewel cases, the disc is suspended by the center hole and isolates the written area from contacting any surface, it also offers some protection against rapid temperature changes
THINGS NOT TO DO:
- Bend the disc.
- Use adhesive labels.
- Store discs horizontally for a long time (years).
- Open a recordable optical disc package if you are not ready to record.
- Expose discs to extreme heat or high humidity.
- Expose discs to extreme rapid temperature or humidity changes.
- Expose recordable discs to prolonged sunlight or other sources of UV light.
- Write or mark in the data area of the disc (area where the laser “reads”).
- Clean in a circular direction around the disc.
- Scratch the label side of a CD.
- Use a pen, pencil, or fine tip marker to write on the disc.
- Write on the disc with markers that contain solvents.
- Try to peel off or re-position a label.
Here are some more general recommendations on storing the archival optical media:
- For archiving recordable (R) discs, discs that have a gold metal reflective layer are recommended. It’s said that with current disks, which are better sealed than they used to be, the use of gold as a reflecting layer is less important than it was, however it certainly doesn’t hurt!
- For general storage, a temperature between 4°C (39°F) and 20°C (68°F) is recommended with a relative humidity of 20% to 50%
- For long term storage, 18°C and 40% RH are recommended.
- For extended term archival storage even lower temperature and humidity are recommended.
- Storage in the dark, while not absolutely required, can’t hurt.
FalconMedia products are amongst the highest quality CDs and DVD in the world today, with benchmark testing against other optical media products from the main players in the market showing improved durability, longevity and disc-to-disc consistency. They have also demonstrated lower error rates and jitters, and the printable layers of their discs show excellent ink-drying results and high resistance to water. The combination of these factors makes FalconMedia products the more secure archival media solution available in the market today.