Spectra Logic Backup and Recover Blog

Bring Your Child to Work Day at Spectra

Tue, 08 May 2012 08:46:00 -0600

Children Share Their Impressions from Spectra Logic's Bring Your Child to Work Day Celebration

Last week, over 70 children attended Spectra Logic's "Bring Your Child to Work Day" celebration. This year marked the 20th anniversary of this event and Spectra Logic has participated since its inception.

At Spectra Logic's event, children don't just follow mom or dad around the office, they are exposed to a fun-filled, educational adventure. Throughout the day children participated in a variety of events from tours, to trade shows to interviews and educational workshops. There was also a little downtime with outdoor games and activities and an ice cream social to top off the day.

We asked the children who participated to share their thoughts and impressions on the event by writing about it for our blog contest. Sasha Miller won the grand prize, a $25 gift card, and the other entrants won $15 gift cards for their contributions.

Congratulations to all of our guest bloggers! Here's what they had to say:

Winning Entry (Submitted by Sasha Miller):

"Spectra Logic's Bring Your Child to Work Day was splendid! I learned about all the departments. At registration time, I got my own badge! During the tour, I got to visit building 2, 3, and 4. Most people at Spectra Logic don't know that building 2 and 3 are there. Building 4 is new! When we were at building 4, we saw different rooms! Some rooms were very tight and one was an open floor. The coolest part of building 4 was the crane. We got lifted up, up and away!

"After that was shadow time. I learned all kinds of things. My mom's work is so cool! Outside playtime was a blast! We played sharks and minnows. We even colored! The trade show was awesome. I learned about the machines Spectra Logic makes, advertises and sells. My mom had some prototypes of the things Spectra makes. It is cool how it moves tapes by WiFi. At the last Shadow Time, I answered the questions and I interviewed Matt Lendway and Sara Adams. That's why Bring Your Child to Work Day was wonderful!"

Sasha Miller

"There's a trade show where I got a lot of candy and a pencil, pen and eraser. And I found where my mom's cube was sooner then she did! She found it in a week and I found it in less then a day. And I got a fold up Frisbee. Also I met a really nice guy who works right next to my mom and his name is Eric Lohmar, he is a very, very good at taking photos. And there is another guy named Terence who works with the Spanish customers and I got to hitch a ride on a conference call and that is only because I speak some Spanish because I go to a bilingual school. By the way my mom is Lisa Kovener and I am in 4th grade and I go to Escuela Bilingue Pioneer. Thank you for having me at Spectra Logic!"

Zoe Bray, 4th Grade, Escuela Bilingue Pioneer

"Bring Your Child to Work Day was so much fun and marvelous! I had such a great time. Everything was very well done and fun. Shadow Time was put together well. It is great that kids like me can meet other people and learn what those people do. It is also very nice that they also supplied food for parents and kids. Everyone needs to eat at some point in the day.

"Why do I think Bring Your Child to Work Day at Spectra was so great? There were so many activities for kids to do and have fun with. First, Spectra put together a breakfast and then we got to go on a tour. Next, we went on Shadow Time with our parent or the older kids, like my brother, got to spend time in Engineering or Manufacturing. After that, we got lunch and then we got to shadow some more. I got to interview people in Marketing. We then had some fun outdoor time and, last, we had an ice cream social.

"Spectra probably put a lot of effort to have their Bring Your Child to Work Day happen. Also, everyone was nice and polite. They really made sure everyone felt comfortable coming. These are some of the reasons I really enjoyed Bring Your Child to Work Day. I am really happy my mom works at Spectra."

Allison Beasley, age 8, Peak to Peak Charter School

"I went to Spectra Logic's Take Your Child to Work Day with my Mom. When I was there, I noticed they were all just a happy family and everyone worked together. Spectra Logic employees didn't just cooperate, respect each other and other things, but they also gave valuable information that we can use when we get older. We learned how to make a good first impression at a job interview. We learned about hardware and how to write a computer software program. When I grow up I want to work at Spectra Logic and just have fun."

Kate Dellett, age 9, Arapahoe Ridge Elementary

"My favorite part was seeing how the libraries moved and how the robots picked up the tapes and put them into the slots. I liked the conference rooms and the ice cream party. I think I'll be a great engineer and an artist one day."

Eric Dellett, age 7, Arapahoe Ridge Elementary

Observations from the NAB Show Floor

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 15:17:00 -0600

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!

Got Big Data? 4 Things to Look for at the NAB Show

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 14:49:00 -0600

Spectra Logic’s Kevin Dudak is a contributing blogger for the Inside Big Data Blog. His most recent post has been reprinted below with permission from Rich Brueckner:

Got Big Data? 4 Things to Look for at the NAB Show

I just got an email from the organizers of the NAB Show in Las Vegas this April about my registration confirmation. I’ve always enjoyed attending this show, as it has a lot of things you don’t see at the typical IT show. How many storage shows have provisions for helicopters to fly in and be displayed?

This show draws a wide cross section of organizations, with lots of educational seminars, as well as vendor displays. What they all have in common is data. The capture side creates the raw data, editors and post-production change the data, and broadcast distributes finished data.

It got me thinking, there is so much to see and do at this show, what do I want to make sure I learn at NAB? I will specifically be looking at four things:

4K and Beyond– Video takes space, and HD 1080P video takes lots of space. It has become so easy to capture HD video these days with things like the Go Pro Hero Cam (they should have a cool booth in the Expo Hall), I’ve got hours of footage from bike rides, autocrosses and other events consuming lots of storage. 4K makes 1080P looks small, and there is talk about what follows that. Increases in sensor resolutions will drive bigger video files not just in media, but also in security and other applications. I want to see what is coming, as storage systems need to be ready to hold the additional data.
Digital Workflow– I think everyone looking at Big Data issues can learn a lot here. M&E has spent several years converting to digital file-based workflow. This means lots of huge, high value files that need to be analyzed for meta data creation, modified, rendered and distributed. Every year, they get a little more efficient at the process, something we can all learn from.
Storage – Of course, as a storage guy, I am going to be interested in any new ways to use storage. There will be everything from extreme speed storage for playout at broadcast stations to long term archival storage of digital assets. Asset management of the archives ties in here and is equally important. A lot of the problems that are being solved for long term archive today for M&E will have a broader application in the near term.
Data Movement– How does someone move a Terabyte of data, or a Petabyte securely and with confidence? I am very interested to see how different organizations are solving the data mobility challenge. With 4K video capture becoming more mainstream, and higher resolutions on the horizon, many entertainment companies are a generation or two ahead of the rest of technology users on this front. Lessons learned here will help us all.

There is a lot of potential to learn some interesting things at NAB this year. They are facing the same challenges many Big Data industries are, but they come at it without the preconceived notions of how IT is supposed to work. I think that gives them the potential to create some interesting solutions that can benefit us all.

Big Data Software ? More Than Just Analytics

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 08:47:00 -0600

Spectra Logic’s Kevin Dudak is a contributing blogger for the Inside Big Data Blog. His most recent post, Big Data Software – More Than Just Analytics, has been reprinted below with permission from Rich Brueckner:

Big Data Software – More Than Just Analytics

I noticed a funny thing the other day while on the Storage Networking World website, looking at the different things on the agenda. At the top of the list is the Big Data track the first day of the show. That’s pretty predictable, given everyone seems to be talking about Big Data these days.

Surprisingly, Hadoop isn’t mentioned once in any of the Big Data track session descriptions. Some of the Big Data Track sessions are about Data Analytics, bringing Big Data to the enterprise and where to start with Big Data – in all of this I am sure Hadoop will come up, but it’s interesting it was not mentioned in the titles or descriptions.

At most other events that have a Big Data focus you see Hadoop everywhere. In fact, the feedback from some people that went to the Strata Conference was Hadoop and Big Data are inseparable. It seems that many have begun to believe that Big Data = Hadoop… but does it?

If Big Data equals Hadoop, then Big Data equals Analytics. But Big Data isn’t that simple. Processing, programming, networking and storage have some type of implication to Big Data, and I am sure we will discover many more important aspects over the next year or two.

What were once simple tasks are much more complex when dealing is massive data sets. The impact to storage systems and networks when looking at data protection alone are beyond what most organizations have considered before. With data sets that can now be larger the many disk arrays, migrating to new systems is complex and time consuming.

SNW isn’t focused on Data Scientists, but on storage managers, and while Hadoop will surely be talked about, it won’t be the focus of the day. As time goes on more disciplines will start to look at the implication Big Data plays in their part of the IT ecosystem.

Why It's Important to Focus on the Data, Not the Storage Medium

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 08:27:00 -0600

Spectra Logic's Molly Rector recently had the opportunity to contribute an article to Computer Technology Review on the importance of focusing on the data instead of the storage medium when it comes to data storage. She explained how deciding which storage media to use involves many factors including cost, reliability, data integrity and accessibility.

In the article, she also discusses the advantages and disadvantages of each storage medium and explains how the key to protecting data is to first understand the merits of the storage media, and second, to focus on the data requirements and usage.

To read more on her perspective here’s a link to her Computer Technology Review article: Focus on the Data, Not the Storage Medium

Thinking About Big Data on the Eve of Spring Trade Show Season

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 16:10:00 -0600

Spectra Logic’s Kevin Dudak recently became a contributing blogger for the Inside Big Data Blog. His first post Thinking About Big Data on the Eve of Spring Trade Show Season has been reprinted below with permission from Rich Brueckner:

Thinking about Big Data on the eve of the spring trade show season

The month of March brings longer days, warmer weather and the start of the spring trade show season. There seem to be as many trade shows as there are interest and industries. Last year, we saw a lot of people start talking about Big Data at these shows. The trend most likely will continue, with Big Data taking a bigger share of the conversation.

Given the years I have been in the storage industry, it should come as no surprise that I tend to look at the storage part of Big Data. Over the last year we have heard a lot about the analytics side of Big Data. It is exciting seeing all the amazing things we can do, and things we can learn from the massive amount of data we have at our finger tips these days. Without a doubt, we will continue to see much of the conversation focus on leveraging our data sets with tools like Hadoop. Sometimes, it seems we forget that Big Data is more than just the analytics; it is also about storing and managing potentially massive data sets. 2012 will see users and vendors starting to address the changes Big Data brings to storage.

The 2012 Tape Summit and the HPC Symposium kick off the season. The second annual Tape Summit is the gathering of top manufactures in the Data Tape, including drive, library, software and media companies; as well as press, analysts and bloggers. You don’t see tape and Big Data in the same conversation too often, but I think the tape industry will be looking to change that this year. We will be hearing about Linear Tape File System (LTFS,) continued innovation in data management software and possibly the coming LTO6 and how all of these can have a big impact on storing lots of data.

The HPC Symposium will see presentations from some of the top organizations in the distributed high performance world. Many of the lessons the HPC world has learned over the last 5 years will make the adoption of Big Data easier and more effective.

I’ll be watching to see how LTFS might be a good answer to Big Data portability. We are seeing LTFS gain traction in some verticals like Media and Entertainment already. The question of how to move Petabytes of data, either to seed a cloud provider or just move to a different location has always been a problem. LTFS might just provide a good answer.

Dealing with massive data sets, be it integrity checking the data or protecting it is a struggle we all face at one time or another. We are starting to see a new crop of software vendors, some in the Active Archive Alliance, that are creating data storage environments.

Finally, with the expected shipment of LTO6 this calendar year, we will see a doubling of native capacity on media. There should be performance improvements as well. Since the LTO consortium is attending Tape Summit, hopefully we will get more details on it, and how it might affect the economy of storing big data.

As March rolls on, we should start to see a lot of information coming out of events such as the HPC Symposium and the Tape Summit on not only how to analyze Big Data, but how to manage and store it when it isn’t being crunch.

What if Tape was Dead?

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 15:27:00 -0600

By Steve Mackey, VP Sales, Europe and Africa

From the stage of world history right down to our everyday lives, everyone loves a good ‘what-if…?’. Whether it’s imagining how different the world might be if a famous political figure had chosen a different career, a sporting icon had signed for a different team, or even imagining how different your circumstances might be if you had just taken up a different job offer a few years ago or attended a different college.

So here’s my attempt at a little bit of revisionist history, aimed at some nay-sayers who fixate on tape’s future: What if….tape WAS dead?

First of all I think you need to really work out what tape is really used for in current storage strategies. The shift from tape as a backup medium to an archive medium changes the game here – IT departments that used tape for backup and now use disk might not take the death of tape so badly, but those with archiving needs? That might be a different story altogether.

If you are an organisation that creates a lot of data and needs to retain it medium-to-long term for compliance or for revenue-generating activities then the death of tape will hit you hard – primarily in the wallet but also in other ways.

Just think - if tape WAS dead then the first thing you would have to do is scope out enough disk to match your archiving needs. In terms of straight up acquisition costs per GB we all know that tape is significantly cheaper, but what if your CFO takes a longer term TCO view and asks how the figures stack up over the next decade or even twenty years? Are you really going to show your CFO this report from the Clipper Group, which puts the TCO of Disk over a twelve-year period somewhere around 15 times higher than tape?

Then let’s imagine that this hasn’t been enough to put you off – next up comes the chat with the facilities manager who might be in for a nasty shock when his electricity bill comes in. Those tape drives that would have otherwise sat there silently minding their own business without troubling the power supply will need to be replaced with lots of hyperactive disks that simply can’t bear to sit still. How do you justify those power costs when the disks are being constantly powered but accessed irregularly? Those disks, according to that same report that so shocked your CFO, are going to potentially consume up to 238 times as much power. That’s not good news when companies are looking to cut overhead and power costs are rising.

The financial implications of replacing tape with disk don’t bear thinking about, but there are also practical reasons why disk simply isn’t a good fit. From a disaster recovery perspective tape has always been a popular medium, simply because the media itself is so portable. If you have a primary archive you may decide that your data needs safeguarding against some kind of catastrophe. Getting tapes offline, offsite and into some kind of secure storage is relatively straightforward.

With disk? Not so simple. The only alternative approach, remembering that tape isn’t an option, might be to use an online backup / archiving service. A couple of draw-backs here – first, certainly for large enterprises, these solutions are still considered a relatively unproven solution, not just from a reliability perspective, but also in terms of the potential regulatory implications of putting sensitive data ‘out in the cloud’. Secondly, because of the imperative on these services to keep costs to a minimum, many of them currently use tape as a storage target for customers, but of course in this brave new tape-free world they can’t! So with these services re-architected around disk, providers would undoubtedly have to hike their prices massively, making it an even less attractive proposition.

It’s worth remembering the proponents of this myth about tape’s demise are disk-vendors and it’s funny that they happen to be the only ones who profit in this dystopian IT vision, gaining an unhealthy share of their customers’ wallets. (It’s also interesting to note that most of them use tape themselves in their own IT departments!) That said, IT departments are already struggling to manage data growth cost-effectively, and as we move into the era of Big Data, tape becomes an even more indispensible storage medium. For end-user organisations already struggling to focus IT expenditures on innovation over simply ‘keeping the lights on’ the situation would look very bleak without tape.

Trends in Tape: Looking Beyond LTO-5 with LTO-6 and LTFS Recording and Pre-Purchase

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 08:14:00 -0600

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.

Looking Into the Storage Industry?s Crystal Ball: 2012 Predictions

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 20:13:00 -0600

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.

Ghost of Christmas Future -- Tape!

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 10:09:00 -0600

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.

3 Things to Look for in a Public Cloud Storage Provider

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 10:58:00 -0600

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.

The Data Armageddon: It?s Time to Learn What You Don?t Know

Thu, 01 Dec 2011 10:30:00 -0600

When Thomas Gray inked the phrase, "Ignorance is Bliss, 'tis folly to be wise," I don’t think he considered how best to manage data in our present-day data Armageddon. If you are a data manager and you adhere to the "ignorance is bliss" school of thought, I would recommend that you refresh your resume immediately!

I have spoken with too many people who have no idea of what is to come concerning the world’s rapid and exponentially growing data. Believe it or not, I talked to a person at the Supercomputing show in Seattle who said they are actually moving all their data to disk and neglecting the tremendous, inherent values and benefits (low cost, high capacity and performance, to name a few) of tape. As their data doubles each year, which he said it does, the plan is to continue adding more disk... Really? In his case, I believe he really thinks ignorance is bliss. I offered to share with him how customers with hundreds of terabytes to hundreds of petabytes are managing data with intelligent file systems and using both tape and disk in cost efficient ways and he refused to listen because his ignorance has caused him to believe that "tape is dead". Granted, I don’t hear this very often anymore because the HPC community, as a whole, is paving the way for a cost-effective tape-based storage concept we will discuss later, called "Active Archive".

First, I want to address the ignorance of the individuals who have sipped the "tape is dead" Kool- Aid from certain disk vendors over the past 10 years. Growing up as a teenager in the great state of Texas, I listened to AM radio in my first pickup truck. (Yes, all it had was an AM radio!) Anyway, one of my favorite radio talk shows was Mr. Earl Pitts, who addressed controversial topics and would start by sharing his straightforward opinion on them by saying (insert Texas accent)"Ya know what makes me sick, you know what makes me so angry I could spit?"… or something along those lines. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DDhrRooNp4) Then he would talk about something that is usually contradictory to the American way since he was a patriot who was always watching out for our true, red-blooded American values. Well, I feel sort of like Earl when someone tells me that they think that tape is of no value, which simply shows their ignorance. I want to say “you know makes me sick, you know what makes me so angry I could spit?".....Ignorance! He would always end his lesson on values and truth by saying “Wake up America!” Well, when someone tells me “tape is dead”, I want to grab them, shake them and say “Wake up!”

The reality today, regarding data storage, is that it is not folly to be wise and it is not bliss to be ignorant. Wake up Storage Admins! I have to admit that the number of people I talk to around the country at trade shows, in meetings, etc., are awake and aware of the ever present danger of data explosion. So, needless to say, my blood pressure stays in check and I don’t get angry as often. I try to keep things in perspective and just assume that they simply don’t know what they don’t know.

My job, and that of my colleagues, both at Spectra and within the tape industry overall, is to educate as many people as possible about how to reduce the cost, complexity and fear of managing exponentially growing data. Spectra is leading the charge to create an awareness of how valuable tape can now be in the data center. Tape is no longer used just for backup. It was great to see so many of our HPC customers at SC11, most of whom don’t even use the terminology of “backup” any longer. As tape continued to mature over the last 10 years by getting 700% more reliable, faster and more dense, many of our HPC customers started leveraging the benefits of tape in what we call an “Active Archive”. In other words, they are using tape as disk. An active archive is a combination of open system applications, varying types of disk, and tape hardware that intelligently monitors and migrates data across multiple storage devices while maintaining fast user accessibility. Traditionally, in the backup world, one could only access tapes and the data on them through a proprietary backup application such as NetBackup, Legato, Commvault, etc. I’m not advocating that corporations discontinue backups all together because one should always have a “second” copy of data in the event of a disaster. However, the premise of an active archive is that all data can be online all the time.

Obviously, when someone has hundreds of terabytes or even petabytes, it is cost prohibitive to try and keep all data online all the time in the traditional way of keeping it all on primary or secondary disk. With an active archive file system, the data can be dynamically distributed across multiple storage platforms including disk and tape. Policies can determine where data is at any given time and it is transparent to the end user where that might be. They simply have a drive letter and directory with all their files as normal. Nothing proprietary about access to their data—anytime they need it. By extending a file system across high performing disk, capacity disk and now tape, the need for IT intervention to retrieve an archived file is minimized, if not eliminated. This data management approach is being used by many of our HPC customers and they are benefiting tremendously by having a searchable, compliant format to store data for the total lifecycle of a file based on policies, industry regulations and laws.

I could go on about the benefits of active archive or the inherent values that are characteristic of the tape technologies of today, but I would rather provide some links to more information on both so you can continue your own research and put aside any tendencies you might have to subscribe to the “ignorance is bliss” philosophy! Tape is here to stay and is poised to solve your storage headaches today and in the future by offering greater efficiency, better reliability and maximum performance. So wake up! Data Armageddon: tape’s got this one.

For more information on Active Archive, go to www.activearchive.com

For more information on Spectra Logic tape systems, go to www.spectralogic.com

I also welcome your emails to jimm@spectralogic.com

Happy Birthday, T-Finity!

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 09:16:00 -0600

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:

25 frames in a single library to 40 frames
30,520 LTO tapes to 50,100 tapes in a single library
4 libraries in a complex to 8 libraries in a complex
122,000+ LTO tapes in a single complex to 400,800 LTO tapes in a complex
LTO tape technology exclusively to including industry leading TS1140 Technology tape drives as well
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:

Data Integrity Verification to preserve data viability and integrity – particularly in archives
Continually increasing robotics performance
Expanded MLM database capacity
XML API

And while this growth has progressed, T-Finity has continued to provide the industry’s best:

Library density
Power efficiency
Library management – including built-in encryption key management
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!

?Why I?m Thankful?for Big Data Storage?

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 10:55:00 -0600

We should all be Thankful as “Big Data” improves storage for everyone.

It’s the beginning of the Holiday season, with Thanksgiving travel in full swing. I’ll be getting 10 hours of windshield time shortly, as I’m headed to see family.

As more of our customers have moved into the world of “Big Data” we have been looking at how to make storage ready for ExaScale. ExaScale sized storage has challenges that storing a handful of Terabytes never imagined. Spectra announced the 12^thgeneration of BlueScaleearlier this month with a lot of advancements for Big Data customers. While “Big Data” can mean a lot of different things to different organizations, one thing that is common is the need to storage and manage huge amounts of information. We spent hours working with our customers over the last year looking at where we could make massive storage easier to use.

Simply booting up a multi-petabytelibrary can be time consuming. Traditionally, a library will reinventory itself when rebooting. This takes a few minutes on a library with 50 tapes, but will take hours on a library with 15,000 tapes. Spectra’s BlueScale 12 operating systemwill not force a fresh inventory on reboot. If you didn’t change any tapes, why waste all that time? If you did open the library and change things, then you can tell the system to update the inventory, whichwill save our customers hours.

The number of components that might need code updates over the life of the library grows with data storage as well. What would take a few minutes with a 2 drive tape library could take hours with a 120 drive library. With BlueScale 12, updates are done in parallel, so 120 drive sleds can be updated in the time of one.

Of course, most organizations are not rebooting their libraries or updating firmware every month. We have continued to increase the assistance Media Lifecycle Managementgives our customers. The analytics we evaluateon our Certified Media combined with Data Integrity Verificationon the data written automatically lets informs administrators if there is an issue. They do not need to spend any time managing it, it just works. BlueScale 12 adds MLMsupport for TS1140 technologytape media in Spectra T-Finitylibraries.

These enhancements and more, like the XML interface, Carbide Clean and RAIT make managing the largest storage environments easy and reliable. The great thing about Spectra T-Series libraries is they all run BlueScale. OursmallerT50ecustomers get the same software updates and benefits as our largest T-Finitycustomers. All our customers do not generate multiple petabytes of data, but they all have data that is important to their business. Being able to bring the advances that“Big Data” drives to all our customers is something I am thankful for.

Now, back to the road. Safe travels this holiday season!

Why Tape Rolls On: Reliability

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 09:51:00 -0600

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:

Write data more reliably than disk
Read it after they've written it to make sure they did (where disks often don't do that)
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.