NAB 2012 has come and gone, and it was a great show for Spectra Logic!  We had more meetings and booth traffic than ever before.  While a lot of hype was generated from remote controlled helicopters carrying high def cameras and a large presence by GoPro, here are some things that stood out from the vantage point of the Spectra Logic booth:

Attendance was definitely up.  Of the people that came by, most were in a decision-making capacity, which is a good thing for any vendor.

No more drinking the disk Kool-Aid.  The last of the dying breed of disk only users seem to have paid the high cost of that strategy, unfortunately in loss of content.  One customer in particular, who will remain nameless, I remember well from last year when he was very excited that his station had just procured a rather large amount of disk storage to backup their primary – “oh, we’ll be good for a while now” were his words I believe.  I saw him again the first day of the show and this year he says, “We need to talk!” It turns out that large amount of storage he bought for a great price didn’t help him when a software bug started randomly deleting files.  They lost 7,000 titles!

Tape is hot.  Especially in a world of “tapeless” workflows it’s amazing how everyone wants and needs tape.  It appears that more and more people are realizing that data tape, and specifically LTO tape, are a necessary component of most environments.  Whether it’s for delivering media to other facilities where it just doesn’t make sense to send files on external hard drives anymore, or for mass storage where disk just isn’t cost logical, or for plain old data protection (see above), LTO it seems is on everyone’s list when it comes to storage and archive.  There were lots of questions about LTO6 and its impending release and Spectra’s pre-purchase program.  It’s really amazing to see that even with advances in technology where we can now store 1.5TB per LTO cartridge and soon 3TB per cartridge, and the sizes of libraries getting bigger and bigger, the demand is still there for large systems.  We had a couple of tape libraries on the floor that were each over 2,000 slots, or 3PB, and they weren’t big enough for many.  Bottom line -- if you need it, we’ll build it!

LTFS is increasingly a hot topic.  It is a strong wave in the market that more and more vendors are riding on.  Right now we’re certified with all applications that utilize LTFS, but we do not specifically offer an LTFS-based library. What we’ve made sure of though, is that our Media Life Cycle Management (MLM) can be fully utilized to ensure content is available far into the future.  Time will tell how functional and practical LTFS is, but one thing we do hear is that LTFS alone, in its current form, is not suitable to manage assets.  However, I think ultimately the end-user demands will drive vendors to introduce LTFS based solutions. 

Overall NAB was a great show and Spectra Logic looks forward to another great year next year!

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.
 

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.

Between ESG and Clipper Group, one can generate an interesting discussion about the opportunity costs of powering archive storage on tape versus doing so on disk.  With the power savings available from tape archives, you could buy a lot of stuff.

For this exercise, let’s use ridiculously big numbers to see what we could buy with the money spent in power alone, just for archives.  The 2010 Digital Archive Market Forecast from ESG indicates there will be 79,151 PB of digital data archived by 2012 – next year.  By 2015, ESG expects that data mass to grow to 300,000 PB or 300,000,000 TB of data! 

The Clipper Group published its Clipper Notes in December 2010 providing insight into the difference in power costs between tape and disk.  The title of the article in question is, “In Search of the Long Term Archiving Solution – Tape Delivers Significant TCO Advantage over Disk”.  The article states that the cost of powering a disk archive is 238 times greater than that of tape.

Doing a wee bit of math with the Clipper data indicates the cost per TB of power stored on tape over the course of a year is roughly $1.04.  The Clipper folks calculated that the cost per TB stored on disk for a year is 238 times greater so let’s call it $246.70 per TB, just for grins.  Now the fun part.

If we multiply out the power cost per TB for both tape and disk relative to ESG’s archive forecast numbers for 2012, we get the following:

· Cost of power to store 79,151,000 TB of data on tape in 2012 = $82,317,040.  That’s a lot of beer.

· Cost of power to store 79,151,000 TB of data on disk in 2012 = $19,526,551,700.  That’s $19 followed by a “B”… as in billion.  Now we’re talking real money.  The kind only Uncle Sam spends.

Look further into the future at the power cost associated with archiving all the data ESG foresees and the digits become even more eye popping.  What’s more, these figures don’t factor in the escalating price of power over time.

· Cost of power to store 300,000,000 TB of data on tape in 2015 = $312,000,000.  You could buy a small fleet of yachts with that kind of coin.

· Cost of power to store 300,000,000 TB of data on disk in 2015.  Hold onto your hats folks… $74,010,000,000.  With a stash of cash like that you could buy the countries of Trinidad & Tobago ($26.4B GDP), Jamaica ($23.9B GDP), and the Bahamas ($8.9B GDP) for vacation purposes, then pick up a handful of other countries just to round out the collection – and still have money left over for that fleet of yachts.  Source: Wikipedia - so take the country GDP figures with a grain of salt.    

The point is this:  if you plan to archive large chunks of data for very long and do it only on disk, you’ll pay a lot of money for power.  If you elect instead to deploy an active archive using tape for much of that data, you can save a lot of money on power.  You may even save enough to pay for a vacation junket on your new yacht.

The Active Archive Alliance formation was just announced last week. I wanted to take the opportunity to tell you how the concept originated, evolved and solidified, and why Spectra Logic is participating as a founding member.

Spectra Logic is excited to announce our second product of the year award for the Spectra T-Finity tape library. Brian Grainger of Spectra attended the second annual Data Intensive Computing Environment (DICE) Data Intensive Impact Awards event yesterday and accepted the award.

Cheers to our development team. We appreciate the recognition for our continued innovation and dedication to the high performance computing market.

 

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.

I just got back from the Gartner Data Center Conference 2009 in Las Vegas.  It was a good show – then again, can you have a bad show in Vegas?  I mean, it’s Vegas!  Anyhow, there were lots of decision makers roaming around engaged in a plethora of interesting discussions and speaker sessions.

After that, who do you think has to out-run whom when it comes to long-term economic advantage? Leave us a comment on the topic below:

The sun rises in the east and sets in the west -- consistently. Like clock-work. It’s a good thing. You can depend on it.

Sun, however, rises and sets almost indiscriminately and with little consistency. Except that it seems to be setting farther than anyone imagined. With every gyration, Sun sheds talent. It’s the kind of talent that made its StorageTek products a force in the tape storage industry well before Sun bought them. It’s the same talent that helped put large, automated tape libraries on the map.

If you’re a Sun tape storage customer wondering where your next library will come from then you should check us out. We’re stable -- 30 years worth. We’re profitable – again. We’re innovative – always. And we won’t leave you in the ditch – like the other guys. We have the storage products and expertise to help you leave the Sunset and get back into the light. Come see us. We’ll show you how.