Category: Data longevity

Reading old, dying (audio) tapes

Posted on by Ray in Data longevity, Tape storage

Read a recent article in Phys.org (A physicist uses X-rays to rescue old music recordings) on how researchers team is trying to recover old audio from tape recordings made over 40 yrs ago. It turns out that there are plenty of old musical recordings on reel to reel audio tape that are deteriorating over time.

Even if you had an audio tape playback system that worked for that generation (or prior generation) tapes, the magnetic media is in such a state that it would be at best, result in a destructive read back, at worst end up just destroying the tape with poor to non-existent read back.

Enter the Swiss Research team, apparently the Swiss had been recording Montreux Jazz Music Festival acts on reel to reel magnetic tape for a long time.

They just so happen to have a 48 minute recording of B.B. King, the King of Blues, from 1980 festival. The tape can be barely read on an audio tape deck without destroying it. There will come a time soon where reading it will destroy it.

But it just so happens, that synchrotron radiation (SR) from the Swiss Light Source (SLS) or better known as extremely (several giga-electron volts) bright X-rays can be used to read the “orientation” of every magnetic particle on an audio tape. Note it’s not reading the magnetic field.

It’s almost like the magnetic particles have a different structure depending on whether they are N-S magnetized or S-N magnetized and SR x-rays are reading this structural difference. But I must admit this is only conjecture. I could find nothing online about how extremely bright X-rays would interact with magnetic particle orientation. (IDK how this is really working, any help here would be greatly appreciated).

Enseingne lumineuse devant le bâtiment 2M2C qui regroupe le Miles Davis Hall et l’ Auditorium Stravinski; Avenue Claude Nobs 5; image depuis le Quai de Vernex;

In any case, they are able to read the tape signal (as represented in magnetic particle orientation) using SR light exposure and compare it with the actual audio playback.

At the moment it’s not quite perfect. Even with a proper magnetic signal off a tape ,there’s plenty of electronics (in the tape deck) interpreting that signal into audio sound.

Nonetheless, comparing the two should help tell them when they are reading (via SR x-Rays) it correctly.

Fortunately, the SLS is down for an upgrade, intended to increase the brightness of the SR light by a factor of 40. The researchers believe, brighter x-Rays should lead to more accurate reading of magnetic particle orientation.

What does this have to do with storage?

Magnetic tape has been in use to record digital data almost as long as it has been used to record music. AND much the same environmental impacts, physical tape degradation happens to magnetic tape as audio tapes.

And something that works to recover audio signal from audio magnetic tape should just as well work for digital signal on data magnetic tape. Yeah NRZI, and all the other different data tape formats would need to be considered, but that’s just formatting. If it can read magnetic particle orientation off of magnetic tape it should be able to reconstruct any magnetic tape data.

Unclear if some magnetic tape data is as important as the King of Blues, playing for 48 minutes at the 1980 Montreux Jazz Festival, but my guess there just might be some data out there that is. Now all one would need is a synchrotron at the same power as the new, upgraded SLS to read it.

~~~~

Still if they can read back the audio from the King of Jazz’s music at the 1988 festival, they ought to have a (free) copy on their website, so the rest of us can download ienjoy it as well. IMHO

Photo Credit(s):

Need memory, Intel’s Optane DC PM to the rescue

Posted on by Ray in Data longevity, Storage class memories

I attended Intel’s DataCentric Innovation Conference Tech Field Day eXclusive (TFDx) last April. There were a couple of items Intel presented at the show that peaked my interest there, one of which was DL Boost (see my Intel’s new DL Boost for AI inferencing blog post) and the other was Optane DC PM (data center persistent memory). This post is about Optane DC PM.

As you already know, Optane SSDs have been on the market now for at least a year or so and have not gained much market traction as of yet. I and others attribute this to the high price differential between Optane SSDs and NVMe Flash SSDs but others may say it’s a matter of production yields – probably a little of both.

But Optane, as announced, always had another form factor (if that’s the right term), as persistent memory that could dramatically increase the size of server memory to support new memory intensive applications at a lower price than DRAM.

I was at Nutanix .NEXT conference last week and saw a 4 socket server from DELL that had 6TB of DRAM in it (and 4-44 core CPUs). I didn’t ask the price but when I mentioned I wanted one for my home office, they said it could easily heat my house. So the other problem with a lot of DRAM is power consumption.

Optane DC PM (data center persistent) memory is intended to solve both the high cost and high power consumption problems of DRAM.

How does it work in a server

The newer Intel motherboards support up to 12 slots of memory per socket. And up to 6 of these can be Optane DC PM (512GB DIMM) or 3TB per socket. Optane DC PM is accessed via L1-L2 caching just like any other memory. Apparently with a dual socket system you can have up to 11 Optane DC PM DIMMs on the motherboard.

L1-L2 cache access times are on the order of picoseconds (10**[-12] seconds), DRAM is on the order of nanoseconds (10**[-9] seconds) and flash is on the order of 100 microseconds (100*10**[-6] seconds). So there’s a vast access time gulf between DRAM and Flash that could be exploited with the right technology – enter Optane DC PM.

The only detailed info I could find on Optane DC PM access times was in a research paper (see Basic performance of Intel Optane DC PMM research paper) and it said Optane DC PM assessing times are ~350 nanoseconds, or close to right between DRAM and Flash. At the show the development team indicated that Optane DC PM support about 3GB/sec of bandwidth per module (DIMM).

There are two ways to use Optane DC PM:

  1. Memory mode – in Memory mode, the data in Optane DC PM is thrown away during a power cycle. You must use a block of DRAM as a cache or rather a virtual memory block to the Optane DC PM acting as a paging store. Data is brought into the DRAM cache when accessed using its (virtual) DRAM address and when no longer used. it gets evicted (destaged) back out to Optane DC PM. When power is cycled the data in Optane DC PM is cleared out. Optane DC PM supports AES XTS-256 bit encryption and can easily be cleared by throwing away encryption keys during a power cycle.
  2. App Direct mode – in App Direct mode, Optane DC PM is accessed directly using application APIs and its data persists across power cycles. For App Direct mode, Optane DC PM is still AES 256 encrypted but here the encryption key is maintained across power cycles but is locked on power up and you need to use a pass phrase to unlock it. In this mode, applications are responsible for flushing (L1-L2) caches to Optane to retains all data written through L1-L2 to the Optane DC PM. There’s a GitHub Persistent Memory Development Kit (PMDK) library for that supports the App Direct mode API that applications need to use.

Both modes use DDR-T, (transactional DDR4) a new memory bus protocol for Optane DC PM access. In the DDR-T protocol, access to the memory bus is requested by a CPU and is granted by an Optane DC PM DIMM. All Optane DC PM DIMMs on a system can be accessed in parrallel.

You can use RDMA to replicate (App direct?) Optane DC PM data from one system to another. In order to support Memory and App Direct mode, Optane DC PM required CPU, BIOS and (application) software changes.

Most of the Optane DC PM support and cryptology logic is implemented in hardware. Optane DC PM has an address indirection table (AIT) to support 3D XPoint wear leveling maintained in DRAM but flushed to Optane during power loss. Transfers to 3D XPoint media is in 256 byte cache lines but the memory bus operates in 64 byte cache lines, so there’s a (DRAM) buffer between media and memory bus.

Optane also supports a high availability, or up to two device failure mode. In this scenario, if one Optane DC PM DIMM fails, the system can swap another spare Optane DC PM DIMM into that address space and continue to operate. If a 2nd Optane DC PM fails then the system fails. Not sure what happens to the data on the original Optane DC PM DIMM during a failure. It seems to me data would be lost, but it could depend on its failure mode.

In Memory mode, the expected ratio between DRAM size and Optane DC PM size is should be 32GB DRAM/6TB Optane DC PM. At the TFDx event, the Optane DC PM team had some performance charts showing different DRAM cache miss rates. Intel also announced new CPU monitoring statistics to track application/workloads impacting DRAM/Optane DC PM in Memory mode and to track Optane DC PM health.

Optane DC PM usage modes are established by the BIOS. It’s flexible enough to have the Optane DC PM usage modes be defined on a region by region basis. Not exactly sure what a region is, but it could be an address range spanning MB(?) of Optane DC PM. With both modes in operation on a system, data can be moved from Memory mode Optane to App direct mode Optane or vice versa.

Intel expects that lifetime of an Optane DC PM DIMM to be from 200-370PB of data writes. Optane DC PMs have a 5 year warrantee. Given its bandwidth (3GB/sec), 200PB of data writes should last ~2 years but that’s at 100% duty cycle, writing 3GB of data, every second of every day. So, 5 years should be a reasonable guarantee using a more realistic ~40% duty cycle.

What applications use Optane DC PM

The one of interest to most people seems to be SAP HANA. According to the development team, SAP HANA could use App Direct mode for main database storage and use DRAM for its delta column store. Cassandra could also use Optane in App Direct mode in a similar fashion.

Also something like a REDIS for key-value store could use Optane DC PM to store Values and use DRAM to store Keys.

But any application could take advantage of the extra memory made available with Optane DC PM DIMMs in Memory mode today. Of course any use of Optane DC PM would require the right levels of Intel Xeon CPUs (Cascade Lake), BIOSes and motherboards.

~~~~

Interested in learning more, TFDx videos of the event are available on the website noted previously. Also these TFDx bloggers also have posts specifically on Optane DC PM.

The coolest thing since sliced bread – Optane by Matt Leib, (@MBLeib)

Intel’s crossover point: A 3D spork by Stephen Foskett (@SFoskett)

Intel answering SAP HANA’s tough questions by Keith Townsend (@CTOAdvisor)

Comments?

Hitachi Vantara HCP, hits it out of the park #datacenternext

Posted on by Ray in Cloud storage, Data longevity, Distributed computing, Object storage, Strategic Inflection Points

We talked with Hitachi Vantara this past week at a special Tech Field Day extra event (see videos here). This was an all day affair and was a broad discussion of Hitachi’s infrastructure portfolio.

There was much of interest in the days session but one in particular caught my eye and that was the session on Hitachi Vantara’s Content Platform (HCP).

Hitachi has a number of offerings surrounding their content platform, including:

  • HCP, on premises object store:
  • HCP Anywhere, enterprise file synch and share using HCP,
  • HCP Content Intelligence, compliance and content search for HCP object storage, and
  • HCP Data Ingestor, file gateway to HCP object storage.

I already knew about these  offerings but had no idea how successful HCP has been over the years. inng to Hitachi Vantara, HCP has over 4000 installations worldwide with over 2000 customers and is currently the number 1 on premises, object storage solution in the world.

For instance, HCP is installed in 4 out of the 5 largest banks, insurance companies, and TelCos worldwide. HCP Anywhere has over a million users with over 15K in Hitachi alone.  Hitachi Vantara has some customers using HCP installations that support 4000-5000 object ingests/sec.

HCP software supports geographically disbursed erasure coding, data compression, deduplication, and encryption of customer object data.

HCP development team has transitioned to using micro services/container based applications and have developed their Foundry Framework to make this easier. I believe the intent is to ultimately redevelop all HCP solutions using Foundry.

Hitachi mentioned a couple of customers:

  • US Government National Archives which uses HCP behind Pentaho to preserve presidential data and metadata for 100 years, and uses all open APIs to do so
  • UK Rabo Bank which uses HCP to support compliance monitoring across a number of data feeds
  • US  Ground Support which uses Pentaho, HCP, HCP Content Intelligence and HCP Anywhere  to support geospatial search to ascertain boats at sea and what they are doing/shipping.

There’s a lot more to HCP and Hitachi Vantara than summarized here and I would suggest viewing the TFD videos and check out the link above for more information.

Comments?

Want to learn more, see these other TFD bloggers posts:

Hitachi is reshaping its IT division by Andrew Mauro (@Andrew_Mauro)

Random access, DNA object storage system

Posted on by Ray in Clustered storage, data access, Data density, Data index, Data longevity, data protection, File Storage, Object storage, Strategic Inflection Points, Visionary leadershp

Read a couple of articles this week Inching closer to a DNA-based file system in ArsTechnica and DNA storage gets random access in IEEE Spectrum. Both of these seem to be citing an article in Nature, Random access in large-scale DNA storage (paywall).

We’ve known for some time now that we can encode data into DNA strings (see my DNA as storage … and Genomic informatics takes off posts).

However, accessing DNA data has been sequential and reading and writing DNA data has been glacial. Researchers have started to attack the sequentiality of DNA data access. The prize, DNA can store 215PB of data in one gram and DNA data can conceivably last millions of years.

Researchers at Microsoft and the University of Washington have come up with a solution to the sequential access limitation. They have used polymerase chain reaction (PCR) primers as a unique identifier for files. They can construct a complementary PCR primer that can be used to extract just DNA segments that match this primer and amplify (replicate) all DNA sequences matching this primer tag that exist in the cell.

DNA data format

The researchers used a Reed-Solomon (R-S) erasure coding mechanism for data protection and encode the DNA data into many DNA strings, each with multiple (metadata) tags on them. One of tags is the PCR primer tag header, another tag indicates the position of the DNA data segment in the file and an end of data tag that is the same PCR primer tag.

The PCR primer tag was used as sort of a file address. They could configure a complementary PCR tag to match the primer tag of the file they wanted to access and then use the PCR process to replicate (amplify) only those DNA segments that matched the searched for primer tag.

Apparently the researchers chunk file data into a block of 150 base pairs. As there are 2 complementary base pairs, I assume one bit to one base pair mapping. As such, 150 base pairs or bits of data per segment means ~18 bytes of data per segment. Presumably this is to allow for more efficient/effective encoding of data into DNA strings.

DNA strings don’t work well with replicated sequences of base pairs, such as all zeros. So the researchers created a random sequence of 150 base pairs and XOR the file DNA data with this random sequence to determine the actual DNA sequence to use to encode the data. Reading the DNA data back they need to XOR the data segment with the random string again to reconstruct the actual file data segment.

Not clear how PCR replicated DNA segments are isolated and where they are originally decoded (with a read head). But presumably once you have thousands to millions of copies of a DNA segment,  it’s pretty straightforward to decode them.

Once decoded and XORed, they use the R-S erasure coding scheme to ensure that the all the DNA data segments represent the actual data that was encoded in them. They can then use the position of the DNA data segment tag to indicate how to put the file data back together again.

What’s missing?

I am assuming the cellular data storage system has multiple distinct cells of data, which are clustered together into some sort of organism.

Each cell in the cellular data storage system would hold unique file data and could be extracted and a file read out individually from the cell and then the cell could be placed back in the organism. Cells of data could be replicated within an organism or to other organisms.

To be a true storage system, I would think we need to add:

  • DNA data parity – inside each DNA data segment, every eighth base pair would be a parity for the eight preceding base pairs, used to indicate when a particular base pair in eight has mutated.
  • DNA data segment (block) and file checksums –  standard data checksums, used to verify and correct for double and triple base pair (bit) corruption in DNA data segments and in the whole file.
  • Cell directory – used to indicate the unique Cell ID of the cell, a file [name] to PCR primer tag mapping table, a version of DNA file metadata tags, a version of the DNA file XOR string, a DNA file data R-S version/level, the DNA file length or number of DNA data segments, the DNA data creation data time stamp, the DNA last access date-time stamp,and DNA data modification data-time stamp (these last two could be omited)
  • Organism directory – used to indicate unique organism ID, organism metadata version number, organism unique cell count,  unique cell ID to file list mapping, cell ID creation data-time stamp and cell ID replication count.

The problem with an organism cell-ID file list is that this could be quite long. It might be better to somehow indicate a range or list of ranges of PCR primer tags that are in the cell-ID. I can see other alternatives using a segmented organism directory or indirect organism cell to file lists b-tree, which could hold file name lists to cell-ID mapping.

It’s unclear whether DNA data storage should support a multi-level hierarchy, like file system  directories structures or a flat hierarchy like object storage data, which just has buckets of objects data. Considering the cellular structure of DNA data it appears to me more like buckets and the glacial access seems to be more useful to archive systems. So I would lean to a flat hierarchy and an object storage structure.

Is DNA data is WORM or modifiable? Given the effort required to encode and create DNA data segment storage, it would seem it’s more WORM like than modifiable storage.

How will the DNA data storage system persist or be kept alive, if that’s the right word for it. There must be some standard internal cell mechanisms to maintain its existence. Perhaps, the researchers have just inserted file data DNA into a standard cell as sort of junk DNA.

If this were the case, you’d almost want to create a separate, data  nucleus inside a cell, that would just hold file data and wouldn’t interfere with normal cellular operations.

But doesn’t the PCR primer tag approach lend itself better to a  key-value store data base?

Photo Credit(s): Cell structure National Cancer Institute

Prentice Hall textbook

Guide to Open VMS file applications

Unix Inodes CSE410 Washington.edu

Key Value Databases, Wikipedia By Clescop – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

A knowledge ark, the Arch project

Posted on by Ray in Data longevity, Storage archive

Read an article last week on the Arch Mission Foundation project, which is a non-profit, organization that intends “to continuously preserve and disseminate human knowledge throughout time and space”.

The way I read this is they want to capture, preserve  and replicate all mankind’s knowledge onto (semi-)permanent media and store this information  at various locations around the globe and wherever we may go.

Interesting way to go about doing this. There are plenty of questions and considerations to capturing all of mankind’s knowledge.

Google’s way

 Google has electronically scanned every book in a number of library partners to help provide a searchable database of literature, check out the Google Books Library Project.

There’s over 40 library partners around the globe and the intent of the project was to digitize their collections. The library partners can then provide access to their digital copies. Google will provide full access to books in the public domain and will provide search results for all the rest, with pointers as to where the books can be found in libraries, purchased and otherwise obtained.

Google Books can be searched at Google Books. Last I heard they had digitized over 30M books from their library partners, which is pretty impressive since the Library of Congress has around 37M books. Google Books is starting to scan magazines as well.

Arch’s way

The intent is to create Arch’s (pronounced Ark’s) that can last billions of years. The organization is funding R&D into long lived storage technologies.

Some of these technologies include:

  • 5D laser optical data storage in quartz, I wrote about this before (see my 5D storage … post). Essentially, they are able to record two-tone scans of documents in transparent quartz that can last eons. Data is recorded in 5 dimensions, size of dot, polarity of dot  and 3 layers of dot locations through the media. 5D media lasts for 1000s of years.
  • Nickel ion-beam atomic scale storage, couldn’t find much on this online but we suppose this technology uses ion-beams to etch a nickel surface with nano-scale information.
  • Molecular storage on DNA molecules, I wrote about this before as well (see my DNA as storage… post) but there’s been plenty of research on this more recently. A group from Padua, IT  shows the way forward to use bacteria as a read/write head for DNA storage and there are claims that a gram of DNA could hold a ZB (zettabyte, 10**21 bytes) of data. For some reason Microsoft has been very active in researching this technology and plan to add it to Azure someday.
  • Durable space based flash drives, couldn’t find anything on this technology but assume this is some variant of NAND storage optimized for long duration.  Current NAND loses charge over time. Alternatively, this could be a version of other NVM storage, such as, MRAM, 3DX, ReRAM, Graphene Flash, and  Memristor all of which I have written about
  • Long duration DVD technology, this is sort of old school but there exists archive class WORM DVDs out and available on the market today, (see my post on M[illeniata]-Disc…).
  • Quantum information storage, current quantum memory lifetimes don’t much over exceed 180 seconds, but this is storage not memory. Couldn’t find much else on this, but it might be referring to permanent data storage with light.

M-Disc (c) 2011 Millenniata (from their website)
M-Disc (c) 2011 Millenniata (from their website)

They seem technology agnostic but want something that will last forever.

But what knowledge do they plan to store

In Arch’s FAQ they talk about open data sets like Wikipedia and the Internet Archive. But they have an interesting perspective on which knowledge to save. From an advanced future civilization perspective, they are probably not as interested in our science and technology but rather more interested in our history, art and culture.

They believe that science and technology should be roughly the same in every advanced civilization. But history, art and culture are going to be vastly different across different civilizations. As such, history, art and culture are uniquely valuable to some future version of ourselves or any other advanced scientific civilization.

~~~~

Arch intends to have multiple libraries positioned on the Earth, on the Moon and Mars over time. And they are actively looking for donations and participation (see link above).

Although, I agree that culture, art and history will be most beneficial to any advanced civilization. But there’s always a small but distinct probability that we may not continue to exist as an advanced scientific civilization. In that case, I would think, science and technology would also be needed to boot strap civilization.

To the Wikipedia, I would add GitHub, probably Google Books, and PLOS as well as any other publicly available scientific or humanities journals that available.

And don’t get me started on what format to record the data with. Needless to say, out-dated formats are going to be a major concern for anything but a 2D scan of information after about ten years or so.

In any case, humanity and universanity needs something like this.

Photo Credit(s): The Arch Mission Foundation web page

Google Books Library search on Republic results

“Five dimensional glass disks …” from The Verge

M-disk web page