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.

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.

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...

CTO Insight: Big Data: Why Tape?

 By Matt Starr, Spectra Logic’s CTO

I have watched the tape market’s growth over the last two years, which seems mostly due to the increasing number of archive installations.  With much larger system implementations projected through 2014, this growth will continue for the foreseeable future.  Military low-altitude and high-altitude video surveillance in countries like Afghanistan, the media and entertainment industry’s drive to 4K file data and the growth in PACS data are just a few of the many market segments driving the implementation of large archives. 

These are areas where dedupe and disk, in general, fall down, precisely because of the raw quantity of data involved--the disk resources required would be enormous, and use enormous quantities of power-- and the delays in time to deduplicate, then reduplicate is unacceptable.   

EMC’s recent “Big Data” news splash did not mention tape, which kind of shocked me!   (It’s only kind of shocking, as EMC is tape-hostile.) Tape is Big Data:  80% of the world’s data is stored on tape[1]and tape is the only media that can scale to exabyte(s) and still be cost effective.  In fact, tape is the only cost-effective method of storing Big Data.   Tape storage is denser than disk storage, costs less up-front and is ten times less expensive to operate over time than a disk-based solution.  I am not implying that disk does not have a play in the Big Data world; it is just not well suited as the “meat” of a storage environment.  

So, where does disk belong in this Big Data world?  First, disk works very well as the cache system that interacts directly with the user via a Filesystem, WebDAV, FTP or other front-end system.   Second, disk is the right platform for meta-data storage.  For far too long, users have been saving data as file names and not objects with meta-data.  As archives grow, object storage and meta-data will take the front seat in how data is stored.   Lastly, disk has an important role in helping to make stored data searchable: why would you store data if you cannot get it when you need it?   In my opinion, roughly 10% of the total archive space should be dedicated to meta-data and search.   Add another 10% of the total archive as disk space for cache, and the picture starts to come together.   Roughly 20% of your total archive should be disk, with the other 80% consisting of long lived, reliable, cost-effective tape.

Reliable? Yes. The facts are absolute and irrefutable-- tape is extremely reliable—more reliable than disk.  Tape’s error correction is 10 to -17^thup to 10 to the -19^thbits, which blows disk’s reliability[2]statistics out of the water.   Additionally, modern tape libraries have features like Spectra Logic’s Media Lifecycle Management that predictively informs the user about the health status of the tape as it being used. Features like this layer on reliability even beyond tape’s already high reliability.   Through MLM and other features (stay tuned for a few upcoming announcements this spring), Spectra’s T-Series libraries ensure that the data on the tape is intact and recoverable from the archive.

The architects and developers of data archives will continue to build systems based on disk and tape, not just disk.  When Big Data archives are based on disk alone, then one or more of the following scenarios is true:  1.) They are not a Big Data environment, but want to be (or think they are) 2.) They are wasting money and should be answering to their shareholders or voters.   3.) They have been mis-educated on tape.  In the end, tape is far from dead and will continue to prove itself as the ideal medium in the Big Data world.

I think one of my favorite sayings I heard on more than one occasion and in various different words at SC10 this year was, “It is good to be Spectra!”  I heard this from customers, partners, VARs, analysts and other employees, and it is certainly true.  The tape war is on and by all accounts, Spectra is winning the war one battle at a time.  I heard so many times from so many people that we seem to be the dominant tape company in the market.  Tape is who we are.  It is what we do.  After 31 years of being in business, these truths are starting to manifest themselves in our continued success as a tape company.  The past few years, we have been experiencing much of our success and growth in the High Performance Computing industry not because of tape, but what we can do with tape.  Spectra has committed to continued research and development by investing millions into new features and functionality that are a direct result of our HPC customer requirements. We are therefore able to offer direct benefit and value to them.

SC10 continues to be one of Spectra’s best shows of the year.  This year’s event was no exception.  In addition to learning more about current trends in the HPC market in general, our Spectra executives and team were able to meet with hundreds of our HPC customers and potential customers.

As usual, Spectra was at SC10 in full force.  We had a very nice and large booth with a great location.  In the booth, we showcased a 5 frame T-Finity, T950, T380 and nTier system.  We also partnered with IBM HPSS and had a demo system of their software in the booth, which brought a lot of attention and interest.  Fortunately for us, the competition was nowhere to be found.  I was surprised that there were no other direct competitors at the event with any library systems in their booths.  IDC research shows that the high end HPC market grew by 65% in 2009 and is continuing on that path for many years to come.  Storage contributed to the largest percentage of that growth at almost 10% to just over 3 billion!  In addition to that, they cite that some of the major data center challenges are power, cooling, real estate and system management.  Storage and data management continue to grow in importance.  All these factors and challenges are continuing to increase data centers’ usage of tape, not just for backup, but for near line data archiving.  Through Spectra’s innovations, continued product development and commitment to customer service and support, we will continue to gain market share from the competition and continue to validate ourselves as the market leader.

In the spirit of continuing to be the leader in tape storage, Spectra has a roadmap a mile wide and 2 miles deep.  We continue to innovate, create and incorporate significant enhancements into our products in order to give our customers bigger, better and faster systems that meet their growing demands for performance and scalability.  Much of our continued focus on development is enhancing our T-Finity platform.  By quarter two of next year, we will incorporate the IBM Enterprise TS1130 drive in the T-Finity.  Many of our HPC customers have been anxiously awaiting this feature and we anticipate that the ability to include both LTO and Jaguar drives in our system will be a significant competitive advantage.  In addition to this, we are continuing development of our “fly-over” feature that will interconnect multiple 25 frame T-Finity systems’ allowing scalability that surpasses all other systems on the market today by a long shot!

Our marketing efforts this year were second to none.  We really pushed the active archive message and there was certainly a lot of buzz at the show about it. 

There were analyst meetings with the usual suspects such as IDC and Intersect 360.  They always want to spend time with us to find out what we are up to and it is always good to spend time with them to find out what the market is up to based on their research and findings.  Leigh Grainger always does an outstanding job arranging these important meetings and interviews.

Molly Rector’s speech on “Tape Takes on Mass Storage” had about 120 people in attendance, which was very obvious when our booth began buzzing with activity following her presentation. 

In Summary

The HPC industry is continuing to grow and data storage is the fastest growth component.  We have customers that are already planning on having an Exabyte of data by 2017.  This means that they will continue to double their data storage each year along with other HPC customers.  This explosive and exponential growth is going to demand a large-scale system that can accommodate and manage more data every year in a secure, energy efficient, reliable and space conservative manner.   Spectra understands the growing pains of storage and we are keenly aware of the associated challenges.  This is why we continue to develop products that address the challenges and meet the demanding requirements for data storage.

SC10 in New Orleans:

Best show ever!

Best booth ever!

Best team ever!

Most opportunities ever!

This will, once again, be our best year ever!

Gartner last month announced the results of an enterprise infrastructure survey conducted with over 1,000 large enterprises -http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1460213 – and they make interesting reading. According to respondents; data growth is the biggest data centre hardware infrastructure challenge for large enterprises. Now, this in itself is probably not surprising – vendors, end-users and other industry analysts have been talking about this challenge for some time. The inescapable truth is that storage demands are growing, and the answer lies somewhere between provisioning greater capacity and making more efficient use of the resources available. What is particularly striking is that 62% of respondents reported that they will be investing in data archiving or retirement by the end of 2011.

From Spectra Logic’s perspective it is particularly encouraging to see data archiving and retirement projects cited by respondents as the most popular response to the challenge of data growth.  Many of the conversations we had recently with end-users at SNW Europe centred around this theme. Backup is still important to customers – after all, disaster recovery will always be a key capability for IT and the wider business – but archiving is moving up the agenda (and rapidly so). Not only was archiving a hot topic of conversation on the show floor at SNW Europe, but our VP of Marketing & Product Management, Molly Rector  gave a very well received presentation entitled Active Archive: Data Protection for the Modern Data Center. Archiving is clearly making the transition from ‘nice to have’ to ‘business imperative’ – (Gartner will have other far cleverer terms for this I’m sure!)

While this is great news for Spectra Logic in terms of validating our position and viewpoint, it also points to a broader trend; customers are clearly beginning to look more closely at some kind of tiering strategy and/or data categorisation. Previously archiving and backup have often wrongly been lumped together under an all-encompassing tier sitting beneath production storage. I would hazard a guess that for a lot of end-user organisations ‘tiering’ has not got much more sophisticated than using disk for production / transactional data and tape for everything else. A number of technologies and drivers are forcing organisations to reassess this approach.

We can't overlook the rise of SSD (another hot topic at SNW), in this movement - it is becoming a viable option for enteprises, but current prices suggest that IT departments will have to carefully assess what data resides on that medium. This may be kicking off a trickle effect, which starts at the top and works its way down the storage hierarchy, with customers doing much closer mapping of data to storage medium and working out the best fit in terms of cost and performance.

Customers will also be looking at what data can be moved off disk altogether, and this is where archiving – specifically active archiving – comes into play. IT departments that investigate active archives will see that this approach is much less of a trade-off in terms of accessibility and performance when compared to disk than they may think. Customers will probably be shocked at just how much data they have sitting on disk which would be much more appropriately stored within an active archive setup. The data is still online and therefore still of value to the business, but on a much more cost-effective medium.

Everything points to a more sophisticated hierarchical approach to data management. Technologies like deduplication and thin-provisioning will play their part in facing up to the challenges caused by data growth, but ultimately a more radical shape-up of storage architectures is required, with active archives a new and very distinct layer.

Spectra Logic was recently honored with an innovative product award for our T-Finity tape library. As I stood up to accept our award — the 4th product award this year for the T-Finity — it struck me just what a year it has been. Going into fiscal 2010, we knew we were very well positioned against our competitors. We were set to release the T-Finity,  we were leading in tape technology innovations due to steadfast R&D investments, and our archive and backup solutions were continuing to gain traction and market share. But fiscal 2010 turned out better than even I had imagined as the stars perfectly aligned for Spectra Logic.  

An economy that demands efficiency, customers that demand high returns on investment, longer sales cycles, tighter budgets and constrained headcounts may have paralyzed some companies, but Spectra Logic came out on top with the best people and the best technology. We ended our fiscal year 2010 on June 30 with record-setting revenues and 25 percent year-over-year growth for our Enterprise and mid-sized tape libraries and disk-based appliances. We boosted our bottom line growth and posted our fourth consecutive year of profitability. This strong showing validates the strength of the tape market for vendors with innovative products that customers increasingly depend on for large, highly reliable archive and backup data stores.

More than ever, enterprise customers are embracing our large-scale libraries – the Spectra T950 and T-Finity, which are fast becoming the preferred storage platform for large, data-intensive environments. Our T-Series tape libraries deliver the highest data reliability, scalability and density in the market.  Our goal was to develop and deliver tape solutions that offered 'no compromises' when compared to disk - and we succeeded. Customers across market sectors, including high-performance computing (HPC) and media and entertainment, rely on our enterprise tape libraries and disk appliances. Whether it's due to the economy, our amplified marketing and sales efforts, great referrals from delighted customers – or a combination of all three — we are now seeing demand from companies of every size and market sector.  Simply stated, customers want the most efficient data archive and backup solutions available — and we give it to them.

Spectra Logic not only leads the market with superior and innovative technology solutions, but we helped set the stage for industry-wide improvement by co-founding the Active Archive Alliance. We joined industry pioneers including Compellent Technologies, FileTek, and QStar Technologies to form the alliance in April 2010. The alliance is dedicated to promoting active archives for simplified, online access to all archived data on both disk and tape. More than a trend, active archiving is set to revolutionize how companies manage their ever-increasing stores of data, particularly through the new capability to extend the file system to tape and bring data on tape into the online archive.

Another area with accelerated growth in 2010 was our International operations, which included a 35 percent increase in revenue for Europe. We are continuing our global expansion, so you'll be hearing a lot more about it in the coming year, including growing our International sales team and participating in top industry trade shows abroad.

We enjoy great partnerships with our worldwide SpectraEDGE channel partners, who played an instrumental role in driving our growth and success. We added more than a dozen new programs and work with 475+ partners, and our SpectraEDGE channel program was recognized this year with the highest '5 Star Partner Rating' from CRN Everything Channel. We are committed to providing our partners with the support they need to profitably succeed.

Looking forward, we will continue to focus on growing the Active Archive Alliance by adding additional strategic partners and offering Active Archive as the most innovative solution for our data-hungry customers. And, we foresee a number of trends that will benefit Spectra and our customers, including:

• Data centers will implement tape-based Active Archives as a means of offloading primary disk storage;
• Tape will be the preferred medium for 80 percent of all data in electronic archives;
• Hardware-based data verification will be considered a requirement in all archive storage platforms;
• SAS disk will replace SATA for archive/backup storage by the end of FY11;
• SSD will be arriving in commoditized arrays, dropping cost per GB, and moving into a position as the preferred medium for performance disk; and
• Dedicated deduplication appliances will fall out of favor.  Deduplication will preferably occur in file systems and backup software applications.

I'm pleased to say that we not only weathered the storm last year, but overcame all that it threw at us. In 2011, Spectra will continue to do what we do best: deliver the most advanced, value-driven data backup and archive solutions in the market, and create breakthrough technology innovations that our competitors struggle to emulate and our customers and partners have come to rely on and expect.