Brad Johns Has a Plan to Cut Technology's Environmental Cost — Using Tape Storage

IT consultant Brad Johns believes that there's a simple approach which could wipe 79 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions from technology's balance sheet, and it's one rooted in a storage medium which has at least partially fallen out of favor: shifting cold data from hard disks to magnetic tape.

"Industry analysts estimate that the amount of data created, captured, or replicated will grow from 33 Zettabytes (ZB) in 2018 to 175ZB by 2025," says Johns, referring to a projection from the International Data Corporation (IDC). "Given the focus on sustainability and the large volumes of storage devices required to store the growing quantities of data in the coming years, organizations have an opportunity to reduce their carbon footprint, improve sustainability, and reduce expenses by migrating less frequently accessed (cold data) from hard disk drive (HDD)-based storage to modern tape storage."

In the early days of computing, paper tape — alongside the punch-card — was about the only way to get software and data into your computer without having to toggle panel switches for hours at a time. Later, the magnetic tape — for home computers, in the form of 15- or 20-minute audio cassettes — took over, offering higher speeds and capacities. Their serial nature, requiring the user to run through the entire contents in the order it was written to find a specific file, meant that when random-access floppy disks and hard disks became affordable they were soon abandoned.

The magnetic tape still has a home in high-end computing, though, where it is typically used for backup storage — though this, too, has seen users switching to hard drives for performance reasons, either off-the-shelf or using a cartridge system like Overland Tandberg's RDX series. Johns isn't focusing on backups and archives, though, but on so-called "cold data" — data which is still required but is accessed infrequently — and how moving it from hard drives to tapes could have a dramatic impact on the environment.

"Compared to an HDD [Hard Disk Drive]-only solution, an active archive that moved 60 percent of the HDD resident data to tape reduced carbon emissions by 58 percent, reduced electronic waste (eWaste) by 51 percent, and reduced the total cost of ownership (TCO) by 46 percent," Johns claims in a piece for the Motion Image Journal brought to our attention by IEEE Spectrum.

"In addition," Johns continues, "if all the data is cold and is transferred to tape, carbon emissions are reduced by 97 percent, eWaste is decreased by 85 percent, and TCO is lowered by 78 percent. Globally, moving 60 percent of the HDD resident data to tape could reduce global carbon emissions by 79 million tons, making a meaningful contribution to reducing global carbon emissions."

Johns' full article is available under closed-access terms in the SMPTE Motion Imaging Journal, though he readily admits that one of the biggest hurdles is the time and effort required to separate data into "hot" and "cold" categories.