Cost-efficient Archive Cloud Storage with Tape: Design and Deployment

TapeOBS is an archive storage service offered by Huawei Cloud, which delivers high cost-efficiency by leveraging tape to store large volumes of archived data. Although tape boasts a low total cost of ownership, its inherent characteristics (e.g., a limited number of drives within a tape library) pose unique challenges when developing a large-scale distributed storage system. To address these challenges, we take a holistic approach in designing TapeOBS. At the high level, we introduce a fully asynchronous tape pool, which supports data scheduling and erasure coding in a batched manner, aligning with the features of tape hardware. Within a tape library, we design a tape-tailored local storage engine and incorporate techniques such as dedicated drives to optimize performance. TapeOBS began its gradual rollout at the end of 2022 and officially started serving customers in 2024. As of this writing, TapeOBS has stored hundreds of petabytes of raw user data.