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.

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.

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.