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.
 

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.

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!

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.

Speed (n.) Swiftness. Rapidity. Rate of motion or performance. (from Merriam Webster)

A trade show participant once told me he didn’t use tape because, “…it wasn’t fast enough”.  When asked how fast he needed to move data he said he needed to move it at about 200 MB/s for his backup purposes.  Furthermore, he believed only disk was fast enough to deliver.  When told a single LTO-4 tape drive could stream data at 120 MB/s and only 2 drives were needed to meet his requirement, he was shocked.  Unfortunately, his perception of tape is not exceptional given the marketing dollars spent “educating the masses” about the speed of disk versus tape.

So what is it about tape’s speed that storage buyers are missing?  If one looks only at random seek time, critical within on-line transaction processing environments for instance, then tape is indeed slower than disk.   But that’s not the only performance metric that’s important. 

Raw throughput can be a requirement in big data environments when moving huge files quickly from storage to application for processing.  Today’s tape drives are built to deliver speed in these areas.  For instance, LTO-5 tape drives move data at 280 MB/s compressed while enterprise tape drives from IBM are capable of slinging data around at 360 to 650+ MB/s compressed respectively.  This means it’s possible to reach transfer rates of upwards of 1PB per hour given today’s enterprise library configurations.  Believe it or not, there are HPC users currently pushing requirements for 1PB per hour data rates.  Tape can deliver that kind of speed on that kind of scale.

When it comes to transporting data between sites, the performance of physical tape movement becomes really interesting.  For example, electronically moving 10 TB of data via an OC-3 or OC-12 line can be expensive running from $10,000 to well over $100,000 per month respectively.  At these prices you have the distinct privilege of transporting that data in 6.1 days for an OC-3 and 1.5 days for an OC-12.  In contrast, you can put 10 TB of data on 2-4 tapes, depending on the type, drop them into a FedEx box and ship them overnight at a cost that’s little more than a rounding error relative to that of the cost of the digital pipes.  In other words, you can’t overestimate the bandwidth of a truck full of tapes – especially for the price!

Will you always have to move data this fast?  Maybe not, but when you do, tape can help you do it at a fraction of the cost of the alternatives.  Maybe that’s why tape rolls on.

To learn more about Why Tape Rolls On, see part  2 of this series discussing the Green Storage characteristics of tape.

by Mark Weis

You are approaching the end of federal buying season (tips here) just as Spectra Logic is wrapping up a record 2011 fiscal year (our CEO’s comments are here.) As a company, we achieved 30 percent overall growth and 49 percent growth in enterprise tape sales. Now is a good time for my annual State of the Union address- to relay what end users are reporting from the field, and share why Spectra Logic Federal revenues grew an astronomical 42 percent over this same time period last year. This combination will supply insight to the healthy contribution that Federal has made to the company’s recent achievements.

1.       IT managers in Federal data centers know it’s not practical to maintain all of their data on costly, constantly spinning disk systems. The power-friendly nature of tape coupled with its cost effective benefits for long-term storage simply make sense.

2.       For those who oversee the “bigger picture”- as in managing the entire data center- archiving on tape is a smart way to reduce your overall IT spend.

3.       High capacity and performance is demanded at data-intensive enterprises and HPC sites within Federal agencies. We’ve seen an increased interest in both subcategories within Federal this past year.

4.       Spectra expanded several partnerships in fiscal 2011, including systems integrators General Dynamics (summary here) Lockheed Martin (press releasehere).

5.       This fiscal year, we’re growing our presence with US Military bases and systems integrators overseas by expanding our Federal program with increased staffing, events and special programs in Europe, the Middle East and Asia. 

6.       We are Federal friendly. Spectra Logic is classified as a small business, we manufacture our storage products in the USA, hold our own GSA schedule, are listed on many federal purchasing contracts, and have developed expertise about your specific needs since we established the Federal division in 2004.

Spectra Logic Federal is currently hiring sales representatives and business development specialists in Boulder, Colo. and Washington, D.C. Current openings can be foundhere.

How can Spectra Logic help you tackle the end of Federal buying season? Contact me directly at markwe@spectralogic.com.

It’s been said that airplanes magically turn money into noise.  In a similar way, it can be stated that disk storage turns money into heat.  In both cases, benefits like fast, reliable transportation and fast random data access accrue as the result of said magic.  Unfortunately, it also means a LOT of money may be involved yielding a lot of noise and heat respectively.

Setting aside the airplane analogy to concentrate on the conversion of money into heat through spinning disk over the long run, what can a storage administrator or CIO due to mitigate the cost of this magical transformation?  The answer to reducing the budget in various cases is tape storage.

Over the past four years, The Clipper Group has conducted a number of studies investigating the cost of disk and tape, including comparisons of power consumption.

The 2007 Clipper paper, “Tape and Disk Costs – What it Really Costs to Power the Devices” looked at a 5-year cost comparison between the power consumption of tape and that of SATA disk and concluded that, “The disk system costs over 25 times more money to power and cool than a similar tape system.”

In February of 2008, Clipper published, “Disk and Tape Square off Again – Tape Remains King of the Hill with LTO4”. In this case, Clipper investigated the 5-year cost of a tape backup system relative to that of a disk-to-disk backup system over the same period.  Clipper’s conclusion: “The energy cost ratio for a terabyte stored long-term on SATA disk versus LTO-4 is about 290:1.” 

Last December (2010), Clipper published their latest analysis, “In Search of the Long-Term Archiving Solution – Tape Delivers Significant TCO Over Disk.” In this instance, Clipper looked at a 12-year time horizon for both disk and tape systems and concluded the following, “The cost of energy alone for the average disk based solution exceeds the entire TCO of the average tape based solution.”  More specifically, “…disk consumes 238 times as much energy as tape under assumptions that lean toward favoring disk.”

With the average price per kWh consumed having increased by 33% over the past 10 years (Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration) holding data long-term is likely to become a relatively expensive energy proposition – especially if you try to retain all that data on disk.  If you project out the amount of data that may be stored, as the Enterprise Strategy Group has done (Spectra Blog: What could you buy for the cost to power an archive?), you can get a sense of what it might cost to power all that storage on either disk or tape.

The economics of tape energy consumption make it an ideal long-term storage repository.  Could that be Why Tape Rolls On?

To learn more about Why Tape Rolls On, see part one of this series discussing the Security characteristics of tape.

by Matthew Star, CTO, Spectra Logic

LTFS, linear tape file system, is sometimes called long term filesytem. No matter what you call it; LTFS lets tape behave like removable disk. Having tested various LTFS applications, I can tell you it is shaping up to become the new standard in tape interchange, particularly in LTO-based archives. LTFS is an open standard that uses two partitions to split directory contents from its associated file data. But what about the other open formats like TAR (derived from “tape archive”), which are open and have compatibility across multiple platforms? How does LTFS stack up in comparison?

Let’s look at both. TAR is a formatted data archive, usually written to tape and designed around sequential media. LTFS is a format used to make tape look more like random access media to the user or consumer of the storage. So, which is better? It depends on your needs and risks profile. TAR has been around for 30 some years and is available in source or binary format on nearly any operating system (OS) imaginable. LTFS currently only runs on about three OS's. TAR is self-describing, but must be accessed in sequence. You really cannot know the whole content of the archives on tape without reading, at a mimimum, the headers of each archive. In other words, TAR requires that you read the whole tape. LTFS, on the other hand, stores its directory, or header, information on a separate partition and thereby only loads a very small amount of data to be able to fully describe the contents of the entire tape.

There are some downsides to using tapes as a random access device. First and foremost, tape was not designed for a random access pattern. So, writing millions of small files to an LTFS formatted tape, then attempting to retrieve every other file on that tape can be a recipe for disaster, as the performance of the drive decreases significantly. This is where TAR works really well, because TAR bundles all of those millions of tiny files into one archive which is then stored as a single file on a single tape. Plus, TAR can restore data as fast as the drive can read it. If on the other hand you are writing hundreds of larger files to tape and want random access to any one of these files, LTFS may just be the trick you’re looking for.

The other advantage LTFS has over TAR is LTFS’s ease of use after the applications and drive stack are installed. LTFS makes the tape look just like a large USB key. TAR must be used with a command line interface (like tar -tvf /dev/tape1) just to get the contents of the one archive on a single tape.

So which one would I use? Both or either--depending on the environment and my needs. I don’t believe you should consider LTFS over TAR as a solution to your petabyte archive. But if you want an easy way to move data from place to place or are deploying a smaller archive, you should review LTFS’s features and benefits.