EMC’s Tape Ball: A New Storage Segment?

While the US audience for EMC’s international storage launch, saw a dramatic motor-bike leap, the European audience saw a more prosaic, but equally visual record: the world’s biggest ball of magnetic tape.

The two stunts were a side-show at the launch of 41 new products, but could have revealed a new storage product segment – admittedly for a very specialised application.

The biggest tape ball in the world

In the foyer at London’s King’s Place, EMC displayed a 2m high ball, weighing around 600 kilos, and made up from five million metres of magnetic tape – enough to stretch from London to New York.

This was certified as a world record by a Guinness World Records representative, who admitted that there had never been another actual attempt.

Meanwhile, in Miami, Bubba Blackwell’s bike leap was also a new record, as – strangely – no one else has ever attempted to leap a bike over 40 EMC Symnmetrix racks – a distance of nearly 20m, and a potential capacity of 8 petabyte (Pbyte).

But the tape ball –  on normal recording methods – could hold a capacity 1.8 Pbyte, so in fact, Bubba could have jumped over far more data, if he had used tape balls instead of Symmetrix racks.

In the space of 20m he could have lined up ten tape balls, containing a massive 18 Pbytes. And users at the EMC event assured eWEEK Europe that in fact the 1.8 Pbyte figure was a conservative one that could be easily beaten using better encoding.

The EMC launch included a wide variety of storage solutions designed for specific applications, from SMB low-maintenance storage to back up to cloud data.

In the process of its stunts, we believe the company has created a new form of data – and possibly a new standard for comparing the capacity of different devices.

Clearly the ‘TapeBall’ is not a good storage repository if any specific data needs to be found – or indeed if any data at all needs to be retrieved. However, for the purposes of stunt bike leaps, it represents a better, more condensed form of storage.

It would also have provided Bubba with a softer landing if anything had gone wrong.

Many thanks to Shpongled for a correction, provided below.