Categories
Physical Tape

The future of physical tape

Chris Mellor over at The Register posted an article discussing Santa Clara Consulting Group’s (SCCG) recent forecast of the physical tape market.  In summary, SCCG’s latest analysis indicates that physical tape sales (both media and drives) decreased 25% in 2009 and 7% in 2008.  Some may suggest that this accelerating decline is a sign that tape is dead.  I respectfully disagree. Tape still plays an important role in data retention and archival and will be used for years to come.

There are some bright points in SCCG forecast.  They suggest that LTO drive revenue will grow at a 2.47% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) through 2014 while tape revenue will decline by a 2.21% CAGR. Clearly they believe that LTO will continue to dominate the market and outperform all other formats.

Categories
Backup Physical Tape Replication

Perspectives on Symantec OpenStorage

A couple of weeks ago SEPATON demonstrated OpenStorage (OST) at Symantec Vision and I posted a blog entry including a link to the demo. I wanted to explore OST in more detail.

OST is Symantec’s intelligent disk interface. It works with all types of disk targets and is most commonly implemented with deduplication enabled storage. OST addresses disk as disk and is different from the traditional tape-based metaphor. It handles backups as images and allows the backup application to simultaneously read and write data and incrementally deleted expired information. OST enables access to NetBackups native disk features such as San Client Backups, Media Server Load Balancing, Intelligent Disk Capacity Management and Storage Lifecycle policies. These are features of NetBackup that can benefit end users and are outside the scope of this blog. In this post, I want to discuss the features that are unique to OST.

The challenge that end users grapple with is how to move or transform data using their backup appliance while maintaining NetBackup (NBU) catalogue consistency. This can be a particularly difficult when using appliance-based tape copy or replication. OST addresses these issues by enabling the appliance to access the NBU catalogue. This means that NBU can instruct the appliance to replicate a copy of the data and maintain separate retention policies on the two copies. Let’s look at these features in more detail:

Categories
Backup Physical Tape Restore

LTO-5 and Disk-based Backup

HP recently announced the availability of LTO-5 and they are currently hosting industry luminaries at their HP Storage Day. I received a question on Twitter from John Obeto about LTO-5 and what it means to VTL and wanted to answer it here. Note that I previously blogged about LTO-5.

The challenge with data protection is ensuring that you meet your backup and recovery requirements, and most companies have fixed SLAs. The advent of LTO-5’s larger tape sizes is nice, but tape size is not the problem, the issue is real world performance. Quantum’s LTO-5 specification suggests maximum performance of 140 MB/sec which is an impressive statistic, but in practice few end users achieve this. The challenge is even greater when you think about minimum required transfer rates as discussed in my fallacy of faster tape post

Categories
Backup Physical Tape Restore

Tale of the Tape: Musings on IBM’s 35TB Tape Announcement

A recent tweet by Chris Mellor from The Register caught my eye. He highlighted IBM’s recent development of a 35TB tape. Here are four articles on the topic:

Engadget

FUJIFILM Announcement

The Register Article

A blog post by Robin Harris at ZDnet

My thoughts

It is interesting to see IBM/Fuji driving tape development. With this announcement they have increased native tape capacity over 21x from LTO-5, the newest LTO offering. The dramatic density improvement will drive a continued decrease specification-based $/GB. However it also raises some new questions:

Performance

Categories
Physical Tape

Musings on the Spectra Logic T-Finity Announcement

Last week Spectra Logic unveiled the T-Finity, a new high-end tape library that is one of the largest and most scalable units in the industry.  The system can grow to 30,000 tape slots and 480 drives and it creates some interesting questions.

As data backup and recovery SLAs have become more stringent, end users have migrated rapidly to disk-based technologies.  Deduplication also adds value by reducing $/GB and required disk capacity although the technology can negatively impact backup and recovery performance.  These two trends have combined to reduce the requirements for physical tape and many tape vendors are seeing declining revenues.  This is not to say that tape is dead, it is very much in use and will be for the foreseeable future, but the use model has changed.  Physical tape is typically used for very long-term data archival where multi-year retention is not uncommon.