Dear Ms. Meade,
I am charged with architecting a backup system without any single points of failure. Obviously, tape is SO failure-prone that I am not including it at all. How do you think I should configure such a system?
Sincerely,
Tape is Doomed

Dear Doomed,
You are doomed if you rely solely on disk for your data backup.  A possible interpretation of your question may be “How much disk does it take to replace tape?”  The answer is “unobtainium”—that is, you can’t replace tape using disk.

Further, the very concept of single point of failure is terribly funny in a terribly dark way. Failure is inevitable, unless you plan to address human imperfection? What about acts of natural and man-made disaster that may affect the national power grid? Switch problems? What about loose screws, including any screwed-up (or self-perceived screwed over) employee?

Instead, consider asking a question that does have an answer—“How can I reliably protect data?” The answer is “disk and tape.”

Ms. Meade is a major fan of disk with RAID 6, offered in Spectra’s nTier disk. With RAID 6, up to three disks can fail without affecting data integrity. Go disk and go RAID. However, disk (even with RAID 6) can’t be considered failure-proof because it has its own Achilles’ heel (aka single point of failure): the RAID controller. You can have all the data you want on all the spinning disk you want—but if the controller fails, the brains are gone, and the bits and bytes you’ve carefully protected are toast. Whither goest the RAID controller, so goeth the data. Dead controller= permanently decomposed data. So disk alone, even with the marvels of RAID, is not enough to provide true disaster recovery and continuity of operations.

Further, please note that your information about tape as failure-prone is completely wrong. Tape is, it turns out, incredibly reliable.  With tape’s reliability increase of 700% over the last decade, multiple layers of ECC protection, and smart Spectra libraries tracking media and drive health, tape meets and beats disk in terms of reliability. If you’re worried about a single point of failure,  make sure you get two tape drives. Consider the T950 and T-Finity libraries’ global spare feature—which is an installed drive that can be directed to take over in case of a drive failure.

Ms. Meade admits that she is curious about the pointy-haired boss who directed you to create the no single point of failure unobtanium backup environment….

Dear Ms. Ahmogul,
IBM recently announced that it created a 35 TB tape that will be commercially available in five years. Since then I have read articles asking good questions, like ‘Do we need 35 TB tapes?’

Sincerely,
An Easy Mark

Dear Mr. Mark,
According to urban legend, in 1981 Bill Gates defended the (then-new) PC’s limited RAM by saying: "640K ought to be enough for anybody." (He denies having said this.)

This legend comes to mind on reading your question: “Do We Need 35 TB Tapes?” (Perhaps in thirty years you may find yourself denying having asked this question.)

To answer the 35 TB question: Why, yes, we will need 35 TB tapes. Just as we continue to require ever greater RAM than 640K, we will also need ever larger storage media, simply because of the incredible rate of data creation.

Simultaneously, the percentage of data to protect over the long-term is growing. (Please refer to the IDC chart, below.)  More data, with a greater percentage of it to be stored for a decade or more, leads to an unavoidable conclusion: we will need to store all that data someplace.

Naysayers revel in pointing out (the obvious fact) that it takes a long time to fill a 35 TB tape. Hence, these Captain Obvious types hold that no one will need or use a high-capacity tape. And, of course, it’s true that filling a 35 TB tape takes awhile. It also takes awhile to fill a 1 TB tape.

The fact that it takes awhile doesn’t alter other facts that include these:
• Huge quantities of data already occupy the digital universe and are multiplying at fantastic rates.
• A steadily higher percentage of this ever-increasing data has to be protected for the long-term.
• No viable alternative to tape for long-term, proven data storage yet exists (or is on the horizon, for that matter).

Over the coming decade, the choice is between using a few big tapes or lots of small ones.  So although you, Mr. Mark, may choose to use and manage 35 one-terabyte tapes, others will chose to use and manage a single tape.

The logic is pretty straightforward.

Kindest Regards,
Ms. Meade E. Ahmogul

Source: Gantz, John F. “The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe,” IDC White Paper, 3/08.  “Figure 8 shows a unique view of the digital universe by the degree to which the information in it might be subject to […] legal and compliance requirements such as ediscovery, HIPAA, or Sarbanes-Oxley; or be valuable enough to expect to store for 10 years or more.”

I’ve recently returned from the 2010 Storage Visions Conference in Las Vegas and wanted to share a few observations. The highlight of my week in Vegas was the honor of accepting a product of the year award for our T-Finity product for Media & Entertainment (M&E) Storage. This is Spectra Logic’s enterprise tape library that stores up to 45PB in a single tape library, and is uniquely suited to broadcast customers with large archive and storage requirements due to high availability, ease of use and scalability. This award marks the first honor for our newest tape library.

Containers for stuff are unbelievably handy. Think how difficult it would be to bring home a dozen eggs if you didn’t have an egg carton in which to carry them? Backpacks for books make getting to and from school a lot easier – even if the books are never removed from the backpack! (There’s probably a lump of coal waiting for that kid.) What about jolly ol’ Santa’s ability to make worldwide delivery without his trusty, fur-lined red bag and sleigh? I don’t think the reindeer will be delivering toys to all the girls and boys one at a time, do you?

Spectra Logic is the only provider of TeraPacks which contain 10 LTO tapes per pack. This makes transporting, importing, and exporting tapes from your library 10 times easier than with any other competitor.   If it’s ease you want, give us a call and we’ll help make your storage admin's holiday season a little bit brighter.

On the tenth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me:

Like your grandma’s holiday fruit cake that’s been re-gifted every year since the dawn of time,

It’s the 6^th day of storage Christmas and we’re half-way home. What better way to celebrate the holiday than with a ginormous gift under the tree? How about a gift that stores well over a petabyte of data in a single rack!

The Spectra T680 in our midrange library family is actually designed to fit both midrange and large data center customers who need intense density and a great economic story. Santa and his elves can fill a lot of stockings in a flash, but even they will find it tough to fill this library quickly!  Give us a call and find out how the T680 can help make for a great holiday season, not only for your storage admins, but for your business.

For some folks, Holidays Without Pain means the in-laws behaved and none of the kids got sick. For storage admins, Tape Without Pain means the backup jobs ran smoothly and there was no mad scramble to recover a tape or fix any gear at one in the morning.  Ahhh, now that’s bliss!

At Spectra, we may not be able to do much about the in-laws or the kids, but we can certainly do something about tape! We firmly believe in Tape Without Pain. In the spirit of giving, we think all those storage administrators out there dealing with archive requirements and backup jobs should be given as much Tape Without Pain as possible. Tape Without Pain from Spectra Logic is super fast, ultra reliable, and so affordable you’ll feel like Scrooge AFTER he was visited by the three Christmas ghosts.

Have you looked at tape lately? If not, give your storage guys the kind of Christmas they’ve been wanting. Contact your Spectra Representative and find out more.

Brother can ya spare a dime? How about sparing some time? Many storage administrators are hard pressed to spare either – especially when it comes to ensuring their archive and backup operations are always on. 

The Grinch may have stolen Christmas from the Whos in Who-Ville, but theirs was still a happy ending. Dr. Seuss probably won’t write such a joyous postscript for your storage people if data is lost or stolen.