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.

Analysis

Disk-based backup has emerged as the preferred target for backup, and deduplication has further improved the business case by reducing storage footprint and cost.  However, tape still has a meaningful place due to to its density, portability and power efficiency.   It is ideal for longer term retention and archival and purchases will continue as indicated by the growth in tape hardware sales.

SCCG suggests that the total market for tape automation was $1.6B in 2009. This represents a substantial revenue opportunity for companies who can drive innovation. Many tape suppliers have re-focused on disk technologies and there is potential for innovative to vendors differentiate their solutions through unique hardware, software and firmware functionality.  These added features could enable the company to grow faster than the market.

Finally, I also believe that the 2009 numbers are understated.  2009 was a difficult year for IT and most companies were forced to reduce expenditures.  These reductions negatively impacted projects throughout the datacenter including tape-centric ones.  Mellor suggests that a consistent 25% annual decrease in tape spending will lead to tape irrelevance in four years; I believe that the 25% decline is an aberration and that the future outlook is not nearly so bleak.  In fact we have already seen a number of storage and tape-centric companies report improved earnings and profits in 2010.

Conclusion

In summary, it is not surprising that 2009 was a difficult year for tape sales.  The combination of a poor economy and the continued move to disk-based solutions impacted the tape market.  However, tape still has an essential role in long-term retention and archive and will maintain its importance into the foreseeable future.  I believe that forecasts of the death of tape or even its near-term irrelevance are over-stated, and that tape will be with us for many years to come.

Related posts:

1. W. Curtis Preston on physical tape
2. Tale of the Tape: Musings on IBM’s 35TB Tape Announcement
3. Tape is not dead!

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:

Optimized Duplication – Yes, this is really the name and I did not mistakenly exclude the “de” before duplication. This is Symantec’s name for intelligent replication. The technology enables a deduplication appliance to replicate only deduplicated data to a remote site while maintaining catalogue consistency. It simplifies the process of replication and management.

Open Storage Direct-to-Tape – In the past, vendors have promoted the ability to create physical tape copies without the intervention of a media server. This capability was promoted as a way to overcome bandwidth constraints, but it created a management challenge because NBU’s catalogue was not involved in the tape creation process. OST enables the VTL appliance to create physical tapes directly in a catalogue consistent fashion. It also allows for different retention times on the VTL resident and tape resident images.

Optimized Synthetic Full Backups – Synthetic Full Backup has been a feature of NetBackup for years. The technology enables NBU to create a new full backup based on the full backup and subsequent incremental backups. The challenge with the initial implementation is that substantial disk or tape I/O operations were required to create the synthetic full backup. The new feature takes advantage of the pointer based technology used within many deduplication and allows the appliance to synthesize the full in an automated fashion. Like the previous two examples, the synthetic full would be created in a catalogue consistent manner which simplifies its creation and management.

All of these features are unique to OST. However, it is critical to note that just because a vendor supports OST does not mean that it supports all of these features. Each vendor must write their OST plugin and decide which of these features to support. Today, the vast majority of OST implementations support Optimized Duplication while very few support Open Storage Direct-to-Tape or Optimized Synthetic Full Backups. When considering a solution you should discuss your vendor’s implementation and the features they support. If you are wondering about SEPATON, we will support all of these features over time.

Symantec should be recognized for their work on OST. They have created a technology that provides real customer benefits. They also should be acknowledged for the openness of the technology. They have made OST an open standard and encouraged all disk vendors to adopt the technology. This provides customers with the choice to choose the OST enabled solution that best works for their environment.

Related posts:

1. Video Demo: SEPATON and Symantec OST
2. Perspectives on Quest Acquiring BakBone

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

Disk-based backup provides the ideal solution to address nightly backup and recovery challenges. A disk-based target will provide variable ingest speeds and can accept data as slow as the source will push it. The disk targets also allow for fast recoveries and will accelerate the process of creating LTO-5 tapes for long-term archive or DR. However, remember that the higher speeds of LTO-5 put a premium on recovery performance and so you should carefully review any disk-based solution to ensure that it can stream your LTO-5 drives.

LTO-5 is an evolutionary tape technology. It provides higher density and improved performance specifications, but the actual performance gains are less clear due to streaming challenges. LTO-5 is ideal for long-term archive or long-term DR applications where you need dense, portable and low cost storage and have infrequent access requirements. Conversely, disk-based backup is optimal for day-to-day backup operations due to the improved speed, reliability and deduplication. In summary, I believe that disk and tape are complementary backup technologies and the LTO-5 announcement further cements tape’s positioning as an ideal archive target..

Related posts:

1. Agent-based VMware Backups
2. Tale of the Tape: Musings on IBM’s 35TB Tape Announcement
3. The Fallacy of Faster Tape

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

If performance is unchanged from LTO-5 and you could stream the drive to maximum specifications and achieve 2:1 compression, it would take about 35 hours of continuous backup to fill the cartridge. Wow, that is a long backup window! Chris Mellor in his Register article linked above suggests some alternative approaches to performance including striping multiple tape drives and adding more write heads to drives. Regardless of the method used, it appears that these new tapes will have to be streamed much faster than any previous tape technology. This will create infrastructure challenges; the IT team must ensure that they have enough bandwidth through the backup process to stream the drive. The concept of shoe-shining becomes particularly painful here since the minimum data transfer rate will also increase.

$/GB

This new high density tape can create $/GB economic challenges both for DR and in the model Chris suggests of striping across drives. The acquisition cost for these tapes will be substantial. If you assume the same $/GB as LTO-4, each of these new tapes will cost about $1,400! Clearly the real world price will be much less, but the cost will increase. The challenge is that the best $/GB is achieved when the tape is filled and compressed. Thus, the best ROI is achieved when you have stored 70 TB of data on the tape (assuming 2:1 compression). If you are using tape for DR, it becomes even more challenging because you want to fill your tapes and your backup jobs will not typically fit in consistent 70TB increments. If you do not manage this effectively you will end up sending hundreds of partially filled tapes offsite which will destroy the ROI.

The situation above gets worse if you look at Chris’s model of striping data across multiple drives. Now your maximum capacity increases linearly with the number of drives. If you assume four drives then your ROI is only maximized when you store 280 TB of data. These numbers get maddeningly large very fast.

Risk of data loss

Now imagine that you have resolved the performance and $/GB issues. You are comfortably filling each tape to its max of 70TB. The challenge now becomes one of data protection. With so much data on one tape, what happens if the tape is lost? What happens if it is unreadable for whatever reason? You are now placing a much larger bet on the reliability and consistency of these tapes than ever before. Are you really comfortable storing so much data on a single piece of relatively unreliable medium? Of course, you place the same bet on tape today but the lower capacity means that an individual tape failure will have a reduced impact.

Clearly the development and launch of massively dense tape can in the right circumstances provide business value. However, I believe that customers must evaluate these technologies in the context of their business SLAs and budgetary requirements and that the new technology will be hard to justify in many instances. Of course, the final specifications have not been announced and so it is possible that the actual product released will be different from the one announced today. I am curious to see the final product and how/if they address these concerns.

Related posts:

1. Musings on the Spectra Logic T-Finity Announcement
2. The Fallacy of Faster Tape
3. W. Curtis Preston on physical tape

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.

It is in the context of this changing market that Spectra Logic released the T-Finity.  It looks like an impressive piece of machinery, but it makes me wonder whether the market really needs it.  If anything, it appears that the market is more interested in mid-range libraries versus these massive units.  However Spectra Logic deserves credit for continuing to innovate in the world of tape.  Many vendors have limited their tape development efforts in order to focus on disk and Spectra Logic has not.

The feature set of the T-Finity appeals to my inner geek.  I have never seen a library with this level of technology although some might consider it gimmicky.  Here are some of the fun features:

• Multiple remotely controlled webcams inside the frame to allow for panning and zooming of the interior.
• LED light on the top that moves with the robot to show where it is at any given moment.
• Dual robots – if one breaks, the other shoves it out of the way and takes over.
• Complete remote management that allows for remote control and management of all features.

It certainly appears that the T-Finity ranks highly on the gadget factor, but what does that mean in actual operation?  Once the geek coolness recedes, the real question is how valuable are these features in real world use.

I believe that Spectra Logic has an opportunity with T-Finity even though the solution addresses a slow growing or even shrinking market.  Prior to the T-Finity, Spectra Logic primarily sold solutions that addressed small enterprises and below.  The T-Finity with its massive scalability targets a segment that Spectra Logic could not effectively address in the past and creates the potential for incremental revenue.  I wonder about the size of the market, but for Spectra Logic this represents a new revenue opportunity.

In summary, customers have been changing their tape use model.  Disk is now the primary target for backup and recovery in most environments and tape is used for long-term archival.  Tape is not dead, but the use model is different.  Spectra Logic has made a bold statement by releasing the T-Finity.  They are one of the few remaining innovators in a shrinking market, and have the potential to take market share from other vendors and improve revenue and profits.

Related posts:

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