The Association of International Librarians and Information Specialists (AILIS) will be hosting the last Library Science Talk of the 2025 programme on Wednesday, 3 December 2025 at 12h30 CET. Mark Lantz (IBM Research Lab) will talk about "The Future of Digital Archival Storage Technology".
This Talk will take place in English on Zoom. Registration is not required. On the day of the event, please connect through the Indico page for the event, here: https://indico.cern.ch/event/1575826/
The Zentralbibliothek Zurich, the CERN Scientific Information Service, and AILIS (Association of International Librarians and Information Specialists, Geneva) jointly organize the Library Science Talks. A programme of talks for 2025 is available on the AILIS website, and slides and recordings from past talks can be found on the AILIS website or the AILIS YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/@ailisgeneva). The talk on 3 December 2025 will be recorded and uploaded to the AILIS YouTube channel as soon as possible after the event.
Talk Abstract:
Today, magnetic tape is the lowest cost technology for storing large volumes of digital data. Historically, areal density scaling has been the main driver of the exponential decrease in cost, i.e. $/TB of capacity, of both tape and hard disk drives. Recently, HDD scaling has stagnated while tape continues to scale at historical rates. The INSIC 2024-2034 Tape Technology Roadmap projects that tape areal density will scale with a 32% compound annual growth rate enabling an approximate doubling of capacity every two and a half years until at least 2034, at which point tape systems are expected to reach an areal density of 315 Gb/in2. The feasibility of these projections have been validated by a recent research single channel tape areal density demonstrations. The scaling challenges and future roadmaps for tape and HDD will be discussed and contrasted with research into alternative archival storage technologies.
Speaker Bio:
Dr. Mark Lantz is a Distinguished Research Scientist and manager of the Tape Research Group at IBM Research Europe - Zurich. He holds degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Alberta and a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge (1997). With over 20 years of experience in storage technology, he has been an IBM Master Inventor since 2011, co-inventor on more than 200 patents, and co-author of over 130 publications. His research focuses on storage technology, computational storage, and system reliability. Dr. Lantz was named an IEEE Fellow in 2019 and has received multiple awards, including the IEEE CSS Control Systems Technology Award (2009) and the IFAC Industrial Achievement Award (2014).
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Katherine Rewinkel El-Darwish
Librarian
World Trade Organization Library
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