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.

 Den-si-ty (n.): The quantity per unit volume, unit area, or unit length. (From Merriam Webster)

Generally speaking, no one wants to pay more than is minimally required in order to store their stuff.  This is probably why so many American garages are filled with boxes and sports gear while the car sits out on the driveway.  It’s less expensive to keep grandma’s knick-knacks and the kids’ hand-me-downs in the garage than it is to pay the folks at U-Store-It to hold it for next spring’s neighborhood yard sale.

When it comes to storing electronic bits, the same premise holds true.  Administrators don’t want to pay more to store their data than is minimally necessary given various constraints around things like response times and availability.  As a result, buying storage gear that provides great density at low cost becomes highly important.  This is especially true given the length of time that bits have to be stored, which in some cases happens to be eternity. 

So what’s the most dense, cost-effective storage for the long-haul?  Tape.  Given proven technology and vendor roadmaps, the effort to extend tape density and cost effectiveness continues unabated.  In January, 2010, IBM and FUJIFILM demonstrated tape technology with a density 39 times greater than the best-in-class tape at that time.

Other notable tape density storylines include:

1) Hitachi and Maxell announced development of a 50 TB tape in May, 2010.

2) Oracle announced it was shipping a 5 TB tape drive in January, 2011.

3) The LTO consortium released a roadmap with a 12+ TB tape (LTO8) in April, 2010.

4) IBM announced shipment of a 4 TB tape drive in May, 2011.

Furthermore, the major tape drive vendors (IBM and Oracle) both specify that the cost per GB of disk is 5x to 10x more expensive than that of tape.  As the density advances noted above continue, the cost per GB will continue to decline going forward.  This means that the forecast for long-term, cost-effective storage on tape will continue to be attractive relative to that of disk.  This is particularly true for those customers facing significant active archive requirements.  Could this be the reason Why Tape Rolls On?

To learn more about Why Tape Rolls On, see part 3 of this series discussing the Speed 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.

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.

First, the odd.  The enormous ball of tape (blessed by the Guinness Book of World Records, a marvelous device with which to level your desk) that EMC stuck in a London hotel lobby is the biggest ball of tape ever (2 meters across).

Why on earth did EMC create this? The tape ball is already denser than any of their disk.  Admitted to be 1.8 PB native capacity, it comes to 3.6 PB compressed. Alternately, using another statement associated with the same source, the tape for the ball came from 6,000 tape cartridges which, if one assumes them to be LTO5, is 9 PB native/18 PB compressed.

Then there was the motorcycle jump.  The bike and rider jumped over 40 Symmetrix racks totaling 8PB and a distance of 20 meters which is the equivalent of ten tape balls (18 - 180 PB).  Thanks, EMC. You’ve just proven that tape is 2.25 to 22.5 times as dense as disk.

Time-out for a history lesson: a brief look back shows that EMC’s CEO Tucci stated, “Backup to and recovery from tape is dead”as recently as November 2009.  So it must be big news to Tucci that all this time, an EMC VP knew about tape’s sneaky habits. Shane Jackson, VP of marketing for EMC's backup and recovery services division, said, "Tape's had a hideout where customers are using it for long-term data retention for data three to seven years old and beyond."Stop the presses. You mean tape isn’t dead?

And finally, what about the outrageous claim that EMC’s new product is “the industry’s first long term retention system for backup and archive." As analyst, Curtis Preston blogged in his response to the announcement, “Huh?  Isn't tape a unified long term retention system for backup and archive?” Thank you, Curtis. Well said. 

The good folks at IDC published a white paper in March 2010 regarding the ROI of data backup and recovery using de-duplication.  Nice paper.  One could spend time picking nits regarding methodologies used in this analysis or any other, but I’d rather focus on the “Challenges and Opportunities” highlighted by the authors on page 13 of the paper.

The authors argue that for smaller organizations, and even some larger firms with satellite offices, backing up to disk and electronically vaulting data may be more cost efficient than backing up to tape technology that is several generations old (LTO-1 was discussed).   The authors certainly paint a picture supporting that position.  However, if one moves beyond the backup and recovery equation to the real elephant in the room, which the authors point out, you’ll find “the looming archive problem”. 

How do you maintain and manage increasing quantities of data over lengthening periods of time while doing so efficiently and cost effectively?  In these situations, I’m not sure keeping disks spinning over 5, 10, 15, and 20 years or more, while adding additional spindles to the mass, is the way to go.  Disks in motion consume power and power is money.  Ask the folks at the Clipper Group about this equation.  For long-term storage like that found in organizational archives, tape’s cost effectiveness can’t be beat.

So what’s a beleaguered storage customer to do in these situations?  Check out an Active Archive.  An active archive allows the user to address the looming archive problem while maximizing the efficiency of available storage pools.  Think single file system, with index, stretched across all your storage that allows for direct retrieval from any of it at any time based upon the search criteria you give it.  Now, critical, frequently accessed data can reside on disk, historical data with minimal recall requirements can be housed on cost effective tape, and you can manage all of it through a single pane of glass.  Doing so allows you to readily provision the storage you already have, refresh it, or add to it as you see fit within your archive.

Active Archive goes well beyond mere backup.  It’s simple, but effective, and it can incorporate disk as the authors of the white paper discuss.  Maybe they should do an ROI analysis on Active Archive as well?