A big ‘thank you’ to all of you who attended our webinar entitled “Trends in Tape: Looking beyond LTO-5 with LTO-6 and LTFS.”  We had the best attendance ever. This is clearly a topic of great interest to many of you out there.  Bob Cone hosted the call and the discussion was packed with a multitude of great information including LTO-6 and the overall LTO Roadmap.  But more importantly, Bob covered the implications of the roadmap and LTFS and how they fit into the overall storage picture. With so many technologies now available, storage hierarchies and designing and choosing the right building blocks for your environment continues to get more complex.  The presentation distilled much of the vast amount of available information on numerous storage alternatives into an easy-to-understand discussion. Tape, Disk and Solid State Disk / Flash were covered including where they fit now, and where they will fit in the future.  The session was recorded and is available at the link below:

Looking beyond LTO-5 with LTO-6 and LTFS

The webinar underscores how LTO-6 fits into the LTO Roadmap and its important performance and capacity improvements over past generations. It also points out the advantages of LTO-6, which is why you may be interested in Spectra’s LTO-6 Pre-Purchase program. 

How many times have you thought about buying a new car, computer, TV, or cell phone but when you found out a new technology was just around the corner, you waited?  Personally, I need to upgrade my iPhone and considered the current 4S, but am waiting for the iPhone 5. Like me, you hold off and limp along with the old technology, anxiously awaiting the new technology.  Well, when it comes to LTO technology, you don’t have to wait.  Spectra is offering our customers a cost-efficient path to get the latest LTO-5 tape drive technology available today, along with an LTO-6 option, where they will receive an LTO-6 drive to replace the -5, as soon as the LTO-6 is available. 

In addition, this is a great opportunity for customers currently on LTO-3 drives:  LTO-6 drives have read/write compatibility with one generation back (LTO-5) and read only with two generations back (LTO-4).  So, if you have LTO-3 drives and media and want to move to a new generation, you could upgrade to the LTO-6 Pre-Purchase option now, get LTO-5 drives now and replace ALL the LTO-3s, read and re-write the data to LTO-5 media.   Then, when LTO-6s are available through the pre-purchase program (with no additional cost), swap out the LTO-5 drives, and be able to read/write with the LTO-5 media.  Otherwise, if you wait and go straight to the LTO-6 drives, you will need some other way to migrate your LTO-3 media, as it will be unreadable with the LTO-6 drives.

Everything is handled at the time of ordering the LTO-5 drives, so when the LTO-6 is available, we would contact you and find out when you would like us to ship the new drives.  Then you just send the LTO-5 drives back.  And all this is done with no additional paperwork.  The new LTO-6 tape drive will double capacity and provide a 50% increase in performance over LTO-5.  With a larger compression history buffer, the expected compression ratio will go from 2:1 to 2.5:1, so LTO-6 will offer a compressed capacity of 8 TB and data transfer rates of up to 525 MB/second.  The sixth generation of LTO tape drives provides many positive implications for IT and business managers and we are excited to offer you our LTO-6 pre-purchase program: LTO-5 today and the ability to be one of the very first to get LTO-6 and all its advantages when it becomes generally available.
 

As we say goodbye to another exciting year in the storage industry, we begin to set our sights on the future and what lies ahead.  While demand for data storage technologies continues to be strong and preparing for managing and effectively utilizing Big Data prevails in many organizations’ new initiative investigation; several technology drivers will directly and immediately impact the storage industry as we head into the New Year. Here’s a look at my predictions for 2012:

Tape is Here to Stay

Tape will continue its resurgence, driven in part by the increasing adoption of tape to offload spinning disk storage. Tape will be used as primary storage file storage for long-term data retention and will remain the most cost-effective enterprise storage media for Big Data and Cloud Storage environments.

Explosive Data Growth Continues

Data growth will continue unabated and more organizations will approach Petabyte capacities and seek new ways to manage, index and access their vast data volumes utilizing active archives.  In fact, the amount of data we manage today will seem insignificant five years from now.

More Cloud Storage Adoption

Cloud storage will increase in adoption with a heightened emphasis on data accessibility and security.

Big Data is Big Driver

Big Data will drive the movement toward massive library repositories that meet both capacity and economic requirements of massive data volumes and large data files. Much of the focus in 2011 on Big Data has been on analytics and how to derive value from this mass of data.  In 2012, we will start to hear more about how to retain and store this data.

Purpose-built SSD Systems Gain Steam

SSD will make further storage inroads and begin taking market share, albeit small, from enterprise disk. Purpose-built SSD systems will gain traction and compete with traditional disk systems that have added SSDs into existing designs.

Hardware-based Data Integrity Verification Required

Hardware-based data integrity verification will become a requirement for ‘best practice’ archive storage.

Spotlight on RAID Rebuild Times

Rebuild times for traditional RAID implementations will become a larger issue as drive capacities continue to grow and organizations keep adding spindles to their environments.

Shift in Traditional Backup Practices

Traditional backup practices will continue to shift.  Data centers will increasingly move to online, file-based archives for long-term data retention instead of utilizing offline backups in proprietary formats.

Unless tape is playing an important role in your storage strategy, you are probably stuck in the storage equivalent of the Ghost of Christmas Past.  

As noted in many industry forums, tape is playing an important role in archive as a reliable and efficient means to provide on-line access data.   Numerous recent Spectra Logic developments including T-Finity, Data Integrity Verification and CarbideClean^TMenhancement to Certified Media are specifically aimed at improving storage in archive and other ‘Big Data’ applications.

However, what often gets overlooked is the importance of tape as a cost-effective solution in the backup and disaster recovery markets.   If you think that dedup is the answer here, think again.  A recent ESG study shows that VTL/dedup solutions are 2 to 4x more expensive than LTO tape.   Once you’re ready to prepare for the future and make the most of your IT budget, check out the new ESG Lab video on Spectra’s T50e and T120 products for overviews of two efficient, scalable solutions in the 10TB to 200TB space with enterprise-class features.

1) Tape: Tape, should and in many cases is, a prominent player in the end to end architecture of a cloud storage provider. As much as we love disk, consider that even in the cloud a copy of all data should be stored on tape. If it isn’t, it is at risk for being lost. Permanently. I did not make this up. Just review news stories about cloud outages with lost data. Replication, snapshots, CDP, RAID, and m-of-n protection are great innovations in disk-based data protection. However, they are not enough. Very large data sets push the error rate thresholds of modern storage systems from statistically negligible to a very plausible reality. The short version: not having an isolated, offline copy, implies an inherent risk, and tape is still the best media suited for offline storage.

This copy of data cannot be should not be able to be accessed, changed, or deleted without some form of human intervention or negligence.  With libraries such as Spectra libraries, it’s easy to encrypt the data and store the tape in the library. An encrypted tape stored in an environmentally stable, secure location is the best method for keeping an offline copy. And, as stated many times before, it is still prudent to maintain a copy of your data, regardless of its use model, within your own storage infrastructure.

About tape: Tape, not disk, is designed to be well suited to offline and off-site storage. Yes, if you leave it on a heater, in the sun, in your trunk, or next to your electromagnetic generator it probably won’t restore, but if you did that to your disk, the data wouldn’t restore either. If you use proper data management techniques tape is much more very reliable than disk.

2. Strong Service Level Agreements (SLA): Make sure your cloud agreement includes SLA’s that align with your usage needs. With the cloud, you get what you pay for. That is both the advantage and risk of using cloud-based storage. If you are using the cloud as an availability or distribution system, then standard SLA’s are most likely fine. However, if it is your sole copy, or only backup of your data, make sure you are investing in a storage service designed to protect that data in the event of an issue at the hosting site. You are only protected as much as your SLA agrees to. If it doesn’t commit to getting your data back in the same condition it was sent (many basic SLA’s don’t) then it isn’t well suited for a backup or worse yet primary target of your company’s assets. Expect your data to be available and healthy, but defend yourself against unexpected outages or data loss by knowing what your SLA agreement is. Also, make sure you know your cloud service provider’s data protection strategy. They may not be willing to share every specific vendor used, but methodology can be disclosed without disclosing specific vendors, which in turn will give you a much more accurate picture of how well your data is protected.

3. An Exit Strategy: While the idea is to store data in the cloud, make sure that there is a realistic way to retrieve or migrate your data to another cloud provider or back to your internal systems. This protects your data in the event that either your company discontinues usage or the hosting company discontinues the service.

Further, keep an eye on the amount of data you are storing in the cloud. It is very likely that the amount of data you are storing is very likely to grow over time, and could outgrow the realistic cost/time associated with sending that data across a WAN. Again, tape is an excellent method of handling seeding and exit strategies. Particularly with open formats of tape, such as LTFS or TAR it’s straightforward to transfer data between two heterogeneous environments. In the event that you have hundreds of terabytes or even petabytes, shipping media is often faster and considerably less expensive than paying for the bandwidth required to download that much data. Additionally, in the event that a hosting company goes out of business, open formatted tapes can be distributed even if the entire hosting system is no longer online. It’s just smart to be able to get your data no matter what happens to the host.

When Thomas Gray inked the phrase, "Ignorance is Bliss, 'tis folly to be wise," I don’t think he considered how best to manage data in our present-day data Armageddon.   If you are a data manager and you adhere to the "ignorance is bliss" school of thought, I would recommend that you refresh your resume immediately!

I have spoken with too many people who have no idea of what is to come concerning the world’s rapid and exponentially growing data.  Believe it or not, I talked to a person at the Supercomputing show in Seattle who said they are actually moving all their data to disk and neglecting the tremendous, inherent values and benefits (low cost, high capacity and performance, to name a few) of tape.  As their data doubles each year, which he said it does, the plan is to continue adding more disk... Really?  In his case, I believe he really thinks ignorance is bliss.  I offered to share with him how customers with hundreds of terabytes to hundreds of petabytes are managing data with intelligent file systems and using both tape and disk in cost efficient ways and he refused to listen because his ignorance has caused him to believe that "tape is dead".  Granted, I don’t hear this very often anymore because the HPC community, as a whole, is paving the way for a cost-effective tape-based storage concept we will discuss later, called "Active Archive".  

First, I want to address the ignorance of the individuals who have sipped the "tape is dead" Kool- Aid from certain disk vendors over the past 10 years. Growing up as a teenager in the great state of Texas, I listened to AM radio in my first pickup truck.  (Yes, all it had was an AM radio!)  Anyway, one of my favorite radio talk shows was Mr. Earl Pitts, who addressed controversial topics and would start by sharing his straightforward opinion on them by saying (insert Texas accent)"Ya know what makes me sick, you know what makes me so angry I could spit?"… or something along those lines.  (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DDhrRooNp4)  Then he would talk about something that is usually contradictory to the American way since he was a patriot who was always watching out for our true, red-blooded American values.  Well, I feel sort of like Earl when someone tells me that they think that tape is of no value, which simply shows their ignorance.  I want to say “you know makes me sick, you know what makes me so angry I could spit?".....Ignorance!  He would always end his lesson on values and truth by saying “Wake up America!”  Well, when someone tells me “tape is dead”, I want to grab them, shake them and say “Wake up!”

The reality today, regarding data storage, is that it is not folly to be wise and it is not bliss to be ignorant.  Wake up Storage Admins!  I have to admit that the number of people I talk to around the country at trade shows, in meetings, etc., are awake and aware of the ever present danger of data explosion.  So, needless to say, my blood pressure stays in check and I don’t get angry as often.  I try to keep things in perspective and just assume that they simply don’t know what they don’t know. 

My job, and that of my colleagues, both at Spectra and within the tape industry overall, is to educate as many people as possible about how to reduce the cost, complexity and fear of managing exponentially growing data.  Spectra is leading the charge to create an awareness of how valuable tape can now be in the data center.  Tape is no longer used just for backup.  It was great to see so many of our HPC customers at SC11, most of whom don’t even use the terminology of “backup” any longer.  As tape continued to mature over the last 10 years by getting 700% more reliable, faster and more dense, many of our HPC customers started leveraging the benefits of tape in what we call an “Active Archive”.  In other words, they are using tape as disk.  An active archive is a combination of open system applications, varying types of disk, and tape hardware that intelligently monitors and migrates data across multiple storage devices while maintaining fast user accessibility.  Traditionally, in the backup world, one could only access tapes and the data on them through a proprietary backup application such as NetBackup, Legato, Commvault, etc.  I’m not advocating that corporations discontinue backups all together because one should always have a “second” copy of data in the event of a disaster.  However, the premise of an active archive is that all data can be online all the time. 

Obviously, when someone has hundreds of terabytes or even petabytes, it is cost prohibitive to try and keep all data online all the time in the traditional way of keeping it all on primary or secondary disk.  With an active archive file system, the data can be dynamically distributed across multiple storage platforms including disk and tape.  Policies can determine where data is at any given time and it is transparent to the end user where that might be.  They simply have a drive letter and directory with all their files as normal.  Nothing proprietary about access to their data—anytime they need it.  By extending a file system across high performing disk, capacity disk and now tape, the need for IT intervention to retrieve an archived file is minimized, if not eliminated.  This data management approach is being used by many of our HPC customers and they are benefiting tremendously by having a searchable, compliant format to store data for the total lifecycle of a file based on policies, industry regulations and laws.

I could go on about the benefits of active archive or the inherent values that are characteristic of the tape technologies of today, but I would rather provide some links to more information on both so you can continue your own research and put aside any tendencies you might have to subscribe to the “ignorance is bliss” philosophy!  Tape is here to stay and is poised to solve your storage headaches today and in the future by offering greater efficiency, better reliability and maximum performance. So wake up!  Data Armageddon: tape’s got this one.

For more information on Active Archive, go to www.activearchive.com

For more information on Spectra Logic tape systems, go to www.spectralogic.com

I also welcome your emails to jimm@spectralogic.com

November marks the second anniversary of the launch of Spectra Logic’s flagship product and the world’s highest capacity storage system: the Spectra T-Finity tape library.

As with any 2 year-old, significant growth  has occurred in a short amount of time.  Since T-Finity’s launch in November 2009, library development has included growing from:

1. 25 frames in a single library to 40 frames
2. 30,520 LTO tapes to 50,100 tapes in a single library
3. 4 libraries in a complex to 8 libraries in a complex
4. 122,000+ LTO tapes in a single complex to 400,800 LTO tapes in a complex
5. LTO tape technology exclusively to including industry leading TS1140 Technology tape drives as well
6. 183 PB in a complex to 3.6 EB in a complex using TS1140 Technology

In addition to the physical growth, the library has also added next generation servers and software to better support a variety of features and enhancements that include:

1. Data Integrity Verification to preserve data viability and integrity – particularly in archives
2. Continually increasing robotics performance
3. Expanded MLM database capacity
4. XML API

And while this growth has progressed, T-Finity has continued to provide the industry’s best:

1. Library density
2. Power efficiency
3. Library management – including built-in encryption key management
4. Product reliability

It’s been an impressive couple of years since T-Finity was introduced to the world.  Watch and see what happens during the next 2 years.  Happy Birthday, T-Finity!

We should all be Thankful as “Big Data” improves storage for everyone.

It’s the beginning of the Holiday season, with Thanksgiving travel in full swing.  I’ll be getting 10 hours of windshield time shortly, as I’m headed to see family.

As more of our customers have moved into the world of “Big Data” we have been looking at how to make storage ready for ExaScale.  ExaScale sized storage has challenges that storing a handful of Terabytes never imagined.  Spectra announced the 12^thgeneration of BlueScaleearlier this month with a lot of advancements for Big Data customers.  While “Big Data” can mean a lot of different things to different organizations, one thing that is common is the need to storage and manage huge amounts of information.  We spent hours working with our customers over the last year looking at where we could make massive storage easier to use. 

Simply booting up a multi-petabytelibrary can be time consuming.  Traditionally, a library will reinventory itself when rebooting.  This takes a few minutes on a library with 50 tapes, but will take hours on a library with 15,000 tapes.  Spectra’s BlueScale 12 operating systemwill not force a fresh inventory on reboot.  If you didn’t change any tapes, why waste all that time?  If you did open the library and change things, then you can tell the system to update the inventory, whichwill save our customers hours.

The number of components that might need code updates over the life of the library grows with data storage as well.  What would take a few minutes with a 2 drive tape library could take hours with a 120 drive library.  With BlueScale 12, updates are done in parallel, so 120 drive sleds can be updated in the time of one.   

Of course, most organizations are not rebooting their libraries or updating firmware every month.  We have continued to increase the assistance Media Lifecycle Managementgives our customers.  The analytics we evaluateon our Certified Media combined with Data Integrity Verificationon the data written automatically lets informs administrators if there is an issue.  They do not need to spend any time managing it, it just works.  BlueScale 12 adds MLMsupport for TS1140 technologytape media in Spectra T-Finitylibraries. 

These enhancements and more, like the XML interface, Carbide Clean and RAIT make managing the largest storage environments easy and reliable.  The great thing about Spectra T-Series libraries is they all run BlueScale.  OursmallerT50ecustomers get the same software updates and benefits as our largest T-Finitycustomers.    All our customers do not generate multiple petabytes of data, but they all have data that is important to their business.  Being able to bring the advances that“Big Data” drives to all our customers is something I am thankful for.

Now, back to the road. Safe travels this holiday season!

Reliability: (adv.) the extent to which an experiment, test, or measuring procedure yields the same results on repeated trials.  Dependable.  Sure.  Trustworthy.  (From our friends at Merriam-Webster). And there’s a picture of tape next to the definition.  Ok, so maybe the picture statement was a stretch, but associating the definition of reliability with tape definitely is not.

Anybody who’s been in the storage industry for more than 30 minutes has likely heard the phrase, “tape’s not reliable”.  Certain marketing machines in the technology space propagate that phrase as much as possible – occasionally with bumper stickers.  Those folks have some imagination, but generally register a bit low on the fact meter.

Here are a few things people are saying about the reliability of tape.

Bit Error Rate Favors Tape Reliability Over Disk  - Horison Information Strategies, April 2011

Summary.“Tape drives and tape media now have a higher BER and longer useful life than disk products making them better suited for the long-term data retention requirements demanded by fixed content, compliance and archive applications. For a specific amount of data transmitted, tape now has a marked reliability advantage over disk - a surprise for many.”¹

^1.“Tape: New Game.  New rules.  Tape re-architects for 21^st century data explosion.” Pg. 6. April, 2011. Horison Information Strategies

Tape More Reliable Than Disk for Long Term Storage – Curtis Preston, June 2011

Summary.

“Tape drives:

1. Write data more reliably than disk
2. Read it after they've written it to make sure they did (where disks often don't do that)
3. Have significantly less "bit rot" or "bit flip" than disk drives over time.”²

^2.“Tape more reliable than disk for long term storage.” Backup Central blog, June 2, 2011

Tape Drives 700% More Reliable Than 10 Years Ago – Debbie Beach, Sylvatica Consultants, 2009

LTO drives are specified with an impressive mean-time-between-failure rate (MTBF) of 250,000 hours at 100% duty cycle, that’s 700% more than the MTBF of tape technologies created a decade ago.³

^3.“The evolving role of tape and disk in the data center.” Pg. 7. 2009, Beech, Debbie; Sylvatica White Paper

One is an accident.  Two is a coincidence.  Three becomes a trend.  The reliability of recording data to tape for storage over the long term is hard to beat.  Could that by why tape roles on?

To learn more about Why Tape Rolls On, see parts 1 through 4 of this series discussing the Security, Green Storage, Speed and Density characteristics of tape.

 Den-si-ty (n.): The quantity per unit volume, unit area, or unit length. (From Merriam Webster)

Generally speaking, no one wants to pay more than is minimally required in order to store their stuff.  This is probably why so many American garages are filled with boxes and sports gear while the car sits out on the driveway.  It’s less expensive to keep grandma’s knick-knacks and the kids’ hand-me-downs in the garage than it is to pay the folks at U-Store-It to hold it for next spring’s neighborhood yard sale.

When it comes to storing electronic bits, the same premise holds true.  Administrators don’t want to pay more to store their data than is minimally necessary given various constraints around things like response times and availability.  As a result, buying storage gear that provides great density at low cost becomes highly important.  This is especially true given the length of time that bits have to be stored, which in some cases happens to be eternity. 

So what’s the most dense, cost-effective storage for the long-haul?  Tape.  Given proven technology and vendor roadmaps, the effort to extend tape density and cost effectiveness continues unabated.  In January, 2010, IBM and FUJIFILM demonstrated tape technology with a density 39 times greater than the best-in-class tape at that time.

Other notable tape density storylines include:

1) Hitachi and Maxell announced development of a 50 TB tape in May, 2010.

2) Oracle announced it was shipping a 5 TB tape drive in January, 2011.

3) The LTO consortium released a roadmap with a 12+ TB tape (LTO8) in April, 2010.

4) IBM announced shipment of a 4 TB tape drive in May, 2011.

Furthermore, the major tape drive vendors (IBM and Oracle) both specify that the cost per GB of disk is 5x to 10x more expensive than that of tape.  As the density advances noted above continue, the cost per GB will continue to decline going forward.  This means that the forecast for long-term, cost-effective storage on tape will continue to be attractive relative to that of disk.  This is particularly true for those customers facing significant active archive requirements.  Could this be the reason Why Tape Rolls On?

To learn more about Why Tape Rolls On, see part 3 of this series discussing the Speed of tape.