The VHS project has been selected in the framework of the AAPG 2025 Call for Projects from ANR, with a JCJC funding.
The project will start in March 2026, and will last until September 2029!
Abstract
Magnetic tapes have been used to store computer data since the 1950s, so the layman now often considers it as an outdated technology. However, tape storage is still and will remain essential in many fields such as academic research, international organisations or cloud companies for its strong practical benefits: low cost per TB, low energy consumption, longevity etc… This dependency on tapes has motivated industrial efforts in technology improvements, resulting in much faster data density progression on tape rather than on disk. After recent breakthroughs in materials used, tape capacity is expected to witness a massive leap in coming years, increasing to several hundreds of TB per tape. This evolution will amplify the main benefits of tape storage.
However, tapes have often been primarily considered for archiving cold data, because of their main drawback: it takes around a minute to mount a tape from its shelf into a drive and position the reading head before starting reading data. This explains the current lack of academic effort to optimize relatively frequent data accesses. Nevertheless, more and more research projects require to handle tremendous volumes of data, which are not only destined to be archived but also regularly accessed for scientific analysis. Budget constraints impose the usage of tape storage, and optimizing tape data access therefore becomes more and more significant, and not limited to improving archive retrieval.
The general idea of the VHS project is to propose new interactions between resource management and tape systems. Using filesystem on tapes, we plan to design novel data placement strategies that will propose efficient data accesses by considering tapes at the level of the storage hierarchy by optimizing its operational cost.
Our methodology starts from the tapes themselves, to better understand the physical processes involved in the different operations. Then, we will leverage this knowledge to derive interactions between tape and disk storage systems in order to improve data placement.
Project organization
Come back in fall 2025 for more details about the VHS project!
This webpage will be updated by the end of 2025 with all information on the progress of the project.