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.
 

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.

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.

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.

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.

Security (n.) Safety. Freedom from worry. Protection. (From Merriam Webster)

Famed bank robber Willie Sutton, when asked why he robbed banks, was quoted as saying, “Because that’s where the money is.”  Today, the money is in the information.  Safeguarding information from deliberate criminal or destructive acts and inadvertent system problems is crucial.  Tape plays a valuable role in delivering that safety.

The Ponemon Institute reported in early 2011 that the cost of a data breach had risen to $214 per individual record and $7.2M per breach.  Insurance against such high dollar events can result in a great return on investment should something go wrong.  One of the first, and still best, methods of insuring against breach scenarios is through data encryption on tape.  Given that the cost of an enterprise tape system can run sub 15 cents per GB with each gigabyte storing thousands of files, valued at $214 per file per Ponemon, the cost of tape encryption insurance is little more than a rounding error relative to the cost of a data breach incident.

Business continuance can be preserved through the use of tape storage like no other simply because tape can be “unplugged” from the system.  As now defunct Australian web hosting firm distribute.IT learned, failure to adequately protect its data with off-line storage i.e., tape, resulted in 30 minutes worth of hacker mayhem putting the company out of business.  4,800 of its customers lost their data with no recourse while the negative business implications of the attack cascaded through distribute.IT’s customer base and affiliates.  Failure to have off-line tape backups allowed the attack to destroy the firm’s disk-based backup data rendering the company inert.

Aside from deliberate mischief, having tape involved in your data security equation provides insurance against accidental or unintended events that can adversely affect a portion, or all, of your firm’s customer base.  Google learned earlier this year the value of tape as tape rescued user emails when a software glitch propagated itself through part of the Gmail system.  Without having data safely segregated from system-wide problems on tape, over 40,000 Gmail users would have lost their information permanently.

Say what you will about tape, but failure to ensure the integrity and availability of your data with tape copies off-line can have tremendously unfortunate consequences for your business.  Tape is highly secure, reliably ensuring data availability in the face of both deliberate or accidental data exposure and destruction.  Maybe that’s why tape rolls on.

As I was bouncing around the country once again, I struck up a conversation with a complete stranger sitting next to me on the plane, which is my usual modus operandi.  Without knowing what industry I work in, he brought up the term "high performance computing" within the first minute of our friendly exchange.  Come to find out, the gentleman is a defense attorney to helicopter pilots involved in crashes. 

During the boarding process, he had his phone glued to his ear as he was engaged in a serious conversation with a couple of aeronautical engineers from Harvard. The engineers were conducting structural research on using multi-dimensional modeling techniques on super computers to help him build his case in determing why a helicopter recently crashed.  It became apparent to me that supercomputers continue to proliferate in our data-driven culture, and play a role in nearly every aspect of our everyday lives. 

Scientists, engineers and generally smart people continue to leverage the power of massive and distributed processers for calculation-intensive tasks such as quantum physics problems, weather forecasting, climateresearch, molecular modeling (computing the structures and properties of chemical compounds, biological macromolecules, polymers and crystals), and physical simulations (such as simulation of airplanes or helicopters in wind tunnels, simulation of the detonation of nuclear weapons, and research into nuclear fusion). 

You might be asking, what is the significance of all of this to me, to storage and to Spectra?  The way I see it, as supercomputers become more common, more and more data will continue to be created!  It also begs a few questions: Where does all that data go and how can it be preserved?  How can it be archived in a manner that makes it searchable and useable into the foreseeable future? As I ask that seemingly rhetorical question, I feel sort of like the famous Sweathog, Arnold Horshack, in Welcome Back, Kotter with my hand raised high in the air saying, “Ooh-ooh-ooooh, pick me Mister Kotter!"  Knowing what I know, I am ecstatic about the supercomputing revolution that we are experiencing because a large majority of the data generated, according to just about any of the more educated storage analysts you talk to, is going to be on tape.  And again, knowing what I know about Spectra and our track record for growth, profitability, and more importantly innovation over the past 32 years, our name is becoming synonymous with "enterprise" tape since we have the world's most scalable, and feature-rich tape system!  Even though I just revealed my age with the reference to Welcome Back, Kotter, I couldn't be more excited about the continued growth of the HPC market and the subsequent growth of the data explosion as a direct result of HPC.  If you can’t see the HPC market being a tremendous opportunity for continued tape growth because of the inherent characteristics of the most reliable, dense and economical media type, then "up your nose with a rubber hose!"  Of course, that is a line from my favorite Sweathog, Vinnie Barbarino!  Sorry if you are offended...

Last week I looked at how archiving data can help take the strain off backup systems.  The theory is pretty simple: if you have less data to backup, then it is easier to meet backup windows with fewer resources.

It should not come as a shock that this basic idea also helps in a disaster recovery event.  I am going to stick with the same example as last week, which is a customer with 100 TB of data.  I am doing this both to be consistent for those of you that read my article last week, and also because I am lazy and have already done most of the work. 

Before I get too deep into this extremely interesting conversation, I want to make sure we are all thinking about the same scenario in respect to archive.  Many people think of archives as a place where data goes to die.  Today's Active Archive systems are very different.  Most file-based data that is fairly static can easily reside in the archive.  When needed, the data is read from the archive directly into the application requesting it.  Active Archiving is as much about how we manage data as it is how we store it.

It is this direct accessibility of the data that has the biggest impact to disaster recovery.  All good archive software can create multiple copies of the data in the archive.   These copies can be cross platform.  In last week’s blog, I assumed three total copies of the archived data, one on disk, two on tape.  One of the tape copies is described as off site. 

Before implementing and archive solution, this 100 TB organization needed to plan to recover 100 TB of data.   This includes moving the data, having storage to recover it to and most important, the time to recover 100 TB. 

After moving 80 TB into the archive, recovery looks different.  All that needs to be done to access the 80 TB in the archive is to ensure the archive application is running.  The data is directly accessible from the archive medium, either disk or tape.  Actual data recovery is now reduced to the 20 TB that are not archived. 

I think of this as a double win.  Day to day, an offsite DR copy gets created and moved.  Instead of 100 TB of data to keep constantly up to date at the remote site, we now only have to keep 20 TB up to date.  The Archive application keeps the 80 TB of archive data automatically updated.  Since that data does not change much, is does not require large amounts of data to move.  Then, when recovery is necessary, only 20 TB must be recovered, rather than the full 100 TB of data, as we can access the archive without recovery.

This just might make it possible for people to implement better DR plans.

How are you using archive in relation to disaster recovery? We’d love to hear your stories and best practices.

Follow me on Twitter.com/3pedal.

We’ve all been privy to the countless articles hitting every technology journal around the world with predictions, forecasts, or trends for the upcoming year.  This is no different from any other year, and is virtually an industry ritual that sets the tone for the upcoming year. Amongst these trends, some were obvious, some were reasonable, and one in particular seemed to catch many people off guard: Tape is back, or more precisely, it never went anywhere.

From CNN’s shock at discovering that Google (GOOG) still uses tape backups as their final tier* , to Oracle announcing their latest 5TB Tape technology, tape has prevailed as one of the busier talking points so far this year. Obviously for Spectra Logic, this is neither a problem nor a surprise, but many people are probably asking themselves, "Why? Why Now?" or even "I thought Tape was Dead?" In order to understand this trend, let’s take a look at the other major trends forecasted for 2011: Cloud, Storage Virtualization, Acquisitions, and Overall cost reduction.

As far as cloud is concerned, whether it be a private, hybrid, or public cloud, tape is a logical tier for any hosting infrastructure. It is the strong silent partner, if you will, for two primary reasons: tape continues to be the most cost-effective format to store data on, and tape provides an offline copy of the data for added security. My college computer security professor used to refuse to plug his computer into the internet on the principle that nothing online is ever 100% secure. Unfortunately, in the era of viruses, worms, malicious attacks, and even software glitches, bugs and data corruption, this sentiment is all too true. I bet the Parish of Orleans Civil District Court will take a much closer look at their cloud service provider’s storage method moving forward after losing large amounts of data due to simultaneous disk crashes in a tapeless environment. Thankfully for the Court, they still have paper records to retrieve from**.

Our second case is that of storage virtualization. In 2010, the Active Archive Alliance was formed by Spectra Logic, FileTek, Qstar, SGI, and Compellent with the intention of educating and promoting the concept of active archiving, or extending a file system across multiple storage devices in a virtualized storage pool. With server virtualization dominating the market in 2010, it only makes sense that the virtualization trend would continue throughout the storage infrastructure. The Alliance, however, was not alone in their efforts to reintroduce the concept of seamlessly tiered storage. With data volumes growing in the Exabytes and floor space, power and cooling costs increasing, tape is the ideal resting point for generally inactive data.  Even in the era of deduplication, MAID, Thin Provisioning, and other power-saving technologies, tape continues to lead the charge for power efficiency and storage density. Why? Tape is designed to be stored offline, which consumes no power. Additionally, IBM and FUJIFILM have proven that tape is far from reaching its physical limitations for storage density with their 35TB prototype tape***. 

Ultimately, our final two trends answer tape’s role in the prior. Oracle now has an investment in tape technology through their acquisition of Sun, and thereby StorageTek’s, tape technologies. IBM, HP, Dell, and Quantum similarly have made an investment in tape technology.  Additionally, many of the loudest voices against the tape market have been acquired, some by companies with tape interests, leaving only one large player still beating the "Tape is Dead" drum: EMC.  So ask yourself... why would a marketing powerhouse spend such energy on anti-tape promotions, if it weren’t a threat on their radar?

These acquisitions have opened the airwaves for the pro-tape messaging to once again make its way into everyday dialog. Why? Because, like our final trend, it's about overall cost reduction. With tape remaining the leader in both low-cost capital expense and low-cost operational expense storage, and the integration of other technologies with tape, it is once again being discussed as a viable, valuable tier within any datacenter design. 

*http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/02/28/google-goes-to-the-tape-to-get-lost-emails-back/

**http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/storage-soup/i365-involved-in-new-orleans-backup-failure/

***http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/23/ibm-and-fujifilm-develop-35tb-magnetic-tape-cartridges-unveil-i/