Can the GSA save $1M in tape?

Some thoughts from the minds at S2|DATA

Tom Coughlin’s recent Forbes article about the Government Services Administration reporting it saved $1M per year by converting off older tapes seems to have generated some curiosity.   While the article was not heavy on the details about how the savings was achieved, S2|DATA’s knowledge of older magnetic media allows us to envision some tangible scenarios.  S2|DATA operates multiple datacenters where we frequently read data from really old backup tapes, with recent projects restoring data from tapes manufactured as far back as the early 1980s.

What we Don’t Know

We don’t know what type of tapes were converted. We also don’t know what they were converted to, or what type of data was contained on the backup tapes. Without these details the $1 million savings claim cannot be definitively evaluated.

Additionally, it was noted that the tapes were 70-year-old storage technology, but that does not mean the tapes or data they contained were 70 years old.  Magnetic media may have been invented approximately 70 years ago, but R&D continues with new tapes products continuing today.

Tape IS a Modern Storage Medium

Backup tapes are an extremely viable solution for storing data, especially for long periods of time.  Modern backup tapes claim to have a shelf-life of 30 years, or more.    Magnetic tape is being used in production at the largest cloud providers in the world.  In fact, if you migrate your data from tape and onto “the cloud,” there is a good chance the data will be sitting on tape at some point while there.

The most common backup tape format currently in use today is the Linear Tape-Open (LTO) format.  Some advantages the LTO consortium claim are:

1. Unbeatable cost efficiency: Tape remains the cheapest storage medium per terabyte by an order of magnitude or more.

1. Superior bit error rates: Modern tape has better data integrity than any other storage medium, by multiple orders of magnitude

1. Exceptional longevity: Properly stored tapes maintain data integrity for 30+ years

1. Unparalleled cybersecurity: Air-gapped tape storage cannot be hacked remotely or hit with ransomware

1. Faster than magnetic disk: There are two metrics to define “faster”: transfer speed and access speed.  Disk wins when it comes to access times, which is the time to the first byte of data. Tape wins when it comes to transfer speed, which is how fast you can transfer data to the medium.  Tape may not be good at random access, but it excels at transfer speed.

The latest LTO-9 tapes store up to 45 TB of data per cartridge, and accept data at speeds up to 1000 Mb/s! The LTO roadmap extends to 144 TB native capacity in future generations.

Looking Backwards – Open Reel 9-track Tapes

If we consider that some really old tape technology still exists and we want to get as close as possible to the 70-year-old timeline the article referenced, the most likely candidate is old 9-track tapes from the 70s or 80s.  These large, reel-to-reel tapes were standard before cartridge-based systems. If you have ever seen a movie from the 60s or 70s that had computers in it, you likely saw some of these on screen.

If the GSA converted 9-track tapes, there are multiple ways this conversion could save serious money.  It all starts with understanding how expensive it can be simply to maintain the status quo.

The Infrastructure Costs

Maintaining operational 9-track tape drives in 2025 would be extraordinarily expensive:

• Obsolete hardware: 9-track drives haven’t been manufactured for decades
• Scarce parts: Replacement components would need to be salvaged from other drives
• Specialized technicians: Few people still know how to service these systems
• Government compliance overhead: Maintaining certification and documentation for ancient systems

In government settings, these factors are compounded. Federal agencies typically require redundant systems, comprehensive maintenance contracts, and extensive documentation. The personnel costs alone for maintaining such legacy systems can be substantial.   Then you must consider the cost of the real estate these systems occupy.  Data center space is considerably more expensive than general office space.

Tape Drive Size

9-track tape drives are massive pieces of equipment. A typical IBM 2401/3420 series tape drive (the standard for many government installations) was roughly the size of a refrigerator – approximately 30″ wide × 30″ deep × 60″ tall (76 × 76 × 152 cm) and weighed several hundred pounds. These units required dedicated floor space in a climate-controlled computer room with raised flooring to accommodate the substantial cabling and air flow requirements.

Each drive also required maintenance of complex mechanical systems:

• Vacuum columns to buffer tape movement
• Capstan motors with precise speed control
• Multiple tension sensors and control systems
• Air bearing tape guides to prevent damage to the tapes

Contrast this with modern LTO drives, which are typically rack-mountable units just 3.5″ tall (2U) and about 19″ wide. A single standard server rack could hold up to 20 LTO drives in less floor space than one 9-track drive.

Media Size

The physical size difference between 9-track tapes and modern LTO cartridges is also staggering:

• 9-track tape: 10.5-inch diameter reel
• LTO cartridge: Compact 4.1″ × 4.1″ × 0.8″ cartridge

This means a single 9-track tape takes up roughly 8 times more physical space than an LTO tape. But the capacity difference is even more dramatic:

• 9-track capacity: ~140-160MB per tape (for the latest models)
• LTO-9 capacity: 18,000,000MB (18TB) native per cartridge

Doing some quick calculations on the GSA’s possible scenario: 14,000 9-track tapes at ~150MB each equals approximately 2.1TB total data. That would fit on a SINGLE modern LTO-9 tape with room to spare, using less than 12% of the tape’s capacity!

Expense vs. Risk

Migrating data off of old tape technology may be viewed as being expensive by some, but doing nothing comes with considerable risk, both direct and indirect, which could far exceed the migration costs.  Governmental entities and regulated corporations have legal obligations to retain certain types of data, so when old tapes experience degradation or damage, these entities could incur expensive “recovery” costs to continue meeting their obligations.  When legal obligations and aged technology merge, careful consideration must be given to both real costs and opportunity costs when deciding to migrate or maintain the status quo.  As per the article, the GSA recently undertook this exact evaluation and determined that there was money to be saved by migrating.

Where Did the Data Go?

This is one of the great unknowns that is not addressed by the article, but let’s explore some of the most likely candidates:

• Tape – As previously mentioned, LTO 9 tapes can store up to 45TB of data per cartridge, and sometimes more with highly compressible data, at a cost of approximately $95 per tape, or a little more than $2 per TB. That is a price per TB that not even the least expensive disk technology available today can come close to matching.
• Cloud – A simple Internet search will reveal hundreds of Cloud storage providers, though the list of those authorized to store US Government data is a lot smaller. As mentioned above, providing services to the US Government is usually costlier than providing them to general businesses due to the additional costs for legislatively mandated compliance monitoring.
• Local Disk Storage – Disk storage inside of a government data center is a possible candidate, though, if chosen, it would come with significant risk if redundant copies of the data were not made and stored in multiple geographically dispersed locations to ensure the data survives any disaster scenario.
• Two or More of the Above – It is possible that the data was migrated off of older tape onto more than one of the above-listed possibilities for redundancy purposes. After all, even cloud providers recommend you have backup copies of their data and disclaim liability for data loss occurring on their systems.  Recent surveys have shown that many businesses utilizing cloud storage do not have backup copies of their data because they believe that the backup obligation falls on the cloud provider.

So what is the most likely candidate, given the nature of the project and who initiated it?  The best guess would be Cloud, with one or more providers getting copies of the data, and the data being stored in more than one of a Cloud provider’s data centers for redundancy purposes.

How Do the Savings Add Up?

The physical space required to store 14,000 backup tapes, if they were 9-track tapes, is not insignificant.  We are not talking a football field sized warehouse, but most likely several thousand square feet of highly secured (i.e. expensive) space which requires temperature and humidity controls to protect the longevity of the tapes.  When you consider the dimensions of the tape drives required to read the tapes, the footprint, electrical and cooling requirements grow even more.  Factor in on-going maintenance of the equipment and space, plus the human resources required to operate such a facility, it is easy to see how costs and grow to upwards of $1M per year.  If, as suggested previously as a possibility, the data was migrated off of 9-track tape and onto one LTO-9 tape, the all of the associated costs of storing the 14,000 tapes shrinks down to worrying about something that is less than 5”x5”x1” in size.

“But I thought you said the Cloud was the most likely candidate!”.  I did!  Did you know that Cloud providers are the largest consumers of backup tapes in the world?  Many companies left tape for the Cloud without knowing that their data would end up on tape again.  Cloud providers offer tiers of storage based on the required accessibility levels of the data, and most data other than highly accessible data ends up on tape.  Without tape, the cost of cloud storage would be considerably higher.

Conclusion

Without knowing the specific details of GSA’s tape environment, no one can definitively validate that they will achieve (or have achieved) their estimated $1 million annual savings claim. However, there are multiple realistic scenarios where such savings are entirely plausible, especially if they were maintaining truly obsolete 9-track tape infrastructure.

About S2|Data

S2|DATA provides the world’s most advanced legacy data solutions to leading organizations globally. With proprietary technology and decades of expertise, S2|DATA delivers faster time-to-data and improved data insight while eliminating both cost and risk. The company’s integrated suite of services includes forensics, backup tape, information governance, and eDiscovery support services.