Back to the Airport

Folks, I have been on-and-off down with the flu and trying to catch up on work.  When I am feeling better, one of my petri dishes is down with the bug, when we are all healed, its my wife who is green around the gills.  That, plus travel, is grinding my bones.

It seems like yesterday when I was in LA doing my final DR seminar of the year for TechTarget.  (Actually, it was Monday and I returned on the Tuesday night red-eye.)  The event was very well attended and follow-up has been enthusiastic.  I feel a bit like Marissa Tomei when she got her Oscar:  They like me.  They really like me.

Actually, that sounds a little weird.

Anyway, I am back in the air tomorrow, flying out to Storage Decisions San Francisco, where I speak twice in the morning on Tuesday.  Then, I dash from the hotel to the airport and fly to Portland for the SuperComputer show.  I will be taping Molly Rector’s talk on Tuesday afternoon, then having dinner with Molly, Matt Starr, and the rest of the gang from Spectra Logic in preparation for my interviews of them which will air on the C4Project.org website shortly.  In fact, before Thanksgiving, the C-4 site will be updated with videos from our Wave 2 sponsors including ASCDI, Virtual Instruments, Tek-Tools, QStar Technologies, TAMP Systems, Spectra Logic and FujiFilm.

I also look forward on Wednesday AM at getting my first look at Spectra Logic’s new T-Finity Library.  Here’s their press release:

Spectra Logic Introduces Industry’s Largest and Most Efficient Enterprise Tape Library
T-Finity’s Modern Design Ensures Enduring Access to Data Archives and Backups for Enterprise IT, Federal, High Performance Computing and Media/Entertainment Organizations

BOULDER, Colo.—November 10, 2009—Spectra Logic, celebrating 30 years of data storage innovation, today announced the industry’s most advanced enterprise tape library that meets demanding archive and backup requirements while saving customers up to 30 percent on initial capital investments and 15 to 20 percent on annual recurring operational expenses.  The Spectra T-FinityTM library offers multiple, redundant robots, scaling to more than 45 petabytes in a single library and to more than 180 petabytes in a single, unified library complex.(1)  The T-Finity is targeted for use in data-intensive environments such as large enterprise IT, federal, high performance computing (HPC) and media/entertainment.

“With escalating data volumes and retention requirements, organizations need large archive and backup solutions that ensure long-term data access.  The Spectra T-Finity provides superior capacity and stored data access, and its modern design resets expectations on the economic savings achievable with tape storage solutions,” said Nathan Thompson, Spectra Logic’s CEO and founder. “The T-Finity library enables customers to consolidate multiple legacy libraries, reduce initial capital investments, control ongoing operational expense, and ensure investment protection with scalability to meet long-term data growth requirements.”

The Spectra T-Finity provides high availability for 24x7x365 operations – the highest storage density available on the market – and high-speed performance to handle sustained high transaction volumes.  These capabilities meet the needs of demanding backup environments, and are key for the growing number of organizations archiving high volume, media-rich data such as research, bio-tech, oil and gas, seismic imaging, surveillance video, media and entertainment, video content and financial applications.  And with support for industry-leading LTO open tape technology and IBM System Storage™ TS1130 tape drives, the Spectra T-Finity enables customers to select their preferred enterprise tape option. 

“Sites with large data sets and data-intensive environments require intelligent, high¬-performance and high-capacity backup and archive storage solutions,” said Steve Conway, IDC’s research vice president of technical computing, and HPC User Forum steering committee member.  “Spectra Logic’s new T-Finity tape library addresses the demanding storage and productivity requirements of HPC and enterprise markets.  It supplies multiple redundant components and unique features, while requiring only a single management interface, thus raising the bar on management simplicity within data-intensive environments.”

Spectra T-Finity delivers enterprise tape library advancements based on a modern design that saves cost while increasing confidence in data integrity and availability on tape:

• Highest Density:  At 72 terabytes per square foot, the T-Finity provides up to 70 percent higher density than competitive offerings. (2)  
• Most Scalable:  Almost 200 percent more capacity and slots in a single library than leading competitors,(3) the T-Finity scales to more than 30,000 slots in a single library and 120,000 slots in a single library complex.  It scales capacity by adding frames non-disruptively, requiring no library downtime. 
• High Availability Hardware:   Delivers up to four nines (99.99%) availability through dual robotics, redundant control and communication paths, and multiple redundant components that increase uptime and support high exchange rate workloads. 
• Confidence in Data Availability:  Spectra’s Lifecycle Management includes proactive library, tape drive and media lifecycle management and reporting to ensure high availability and data integrity.  Additionally, Spectra’s ScanTapeTM functionality verifies the health of tapes before writing data to them, and then verifies the data was successfully written to the tape.  No other library on the market offers this complete environmental and data health intelligence.
• Most Power Efficient:  Extremely efficient, the T-Finity tape library uses half or less of the power per unit of data stored as competitive offerings,(4) minimizing power and cooling costs.
• Integrated Data Encryption and Key Management:  Spectra’s data encryption enables organizations to secure data and reduce the cost of regulatory compliance.    
• Unified Management: As the only enterprise-class library with a single management interface, the T-Finity uses Spectra’s BlueScale™ software to simplify administration, configuration, hot upgrades, security and local and remote reporting.

The Spectra T-Finity’s many ‘built-in’ features include: integrated data encryption; library virtualization and partitioning; and hardware, media and library management software – all included at no additional cost.  Competitive offerings charge extra for these capabilities and require separate servers – increasing hardware, space, power, cooling, support contract and personnel management costs.

The Spectra T-Finity will be on display in booth #2595 at Super Computing 2009 (SC09) at the Portland Convention Center in Portland, Oregon, November 16-19.  Spectra Logic executives will be on hand at the SC09 conference to answer questions and demonstrate the power of the Spectra T-Finity.

Pricing and availability

The Spectra T-Finity tape library is currently in beta and will be available in limited quantities starting in December 2009. List pricing for the Spectra T-Finity, including two LTO4 fibre channel drives, two robots, encryption, Spectra library lifecycle management and BlueScale management software, begins at $218,500.

T-Finity is compatible with all major archive and backup software applications including but not limited to: BakBone NetVault, CA ArcServe, and BrightStor, CommVault Sympana, Filetek StorHouse, FrontPorch DIVArchive, IBM HPSS and TSM, Legato DiskExtender and Networker, MassTech MassStore, QStar, Quantum StorNext, SGI DMF, SGL FlashNet, Symantec Backup Exec and NetBackup, Syncsort Backup Express and XenData.
                                                    
(1)Based on LTO-5 native capacity
(2)The T-Finity library delivers 72 TB/sq ft, and is 40 to 70 percent more dense than competing libraries, which store 40 to 42 TB/sq ft.
(3)A single T-Finity library unit scales to more than 30,000 slots, more than twice the size of the next largest library—the Sun/STK SL8500—at 10,088 slots in a single library. 
(4)The typical power usage of the T-Finity is 873 watts or 0.35 watts/TB, at least half that of competing libraries, which utilize 1,273 to 1,798 watts; or, 0.81 to 2 watts/TB. Assumes maximum slot configurations with twelve drives.

Here is the pretty picture that Leigh Grace sent me of the new platform.

Notice that it doesn’t have any of that neon tube crap that EMC added to its V-MAX to help you overspend your power budget.

Here are the questions I hope to address with Molly and Matt while they stand in front of their new flagship product.

1. If we had followed analyst and pundit prognostications of only a few years ago, tape vendors like Spectra Logic shouldn’t exist today.  What in your view continues to drive adoption of tape technology?
2. Following on to the previous question, has the use of tape moved beyond its original domain (if you think that is backup, the way that analysts tend to portray it)?  Or are we returning full circle to the various uses of tape that predated open systems (in mainframe environments during much of the 60s and 70s, tape was a production media, an archive media, and a backup media)?
3. Tape continues to labor under two sets of complaints:  shrinking backup windows and supposedly slow performance relative to other rotational media – the “backup” issue, and tightening recovery periods and the demand for faster restore than tape can deliver.  Let’s have an intelligent conversation about this:
   1. Shrinking backup windows:  it seems that many of the issues with backup have been linked to backup software, not tape operations.  Poorly conceived backup jobs (superstreaming backups from multiple servers representing dramatically different volumes of data, network speeds, etc.) and brain-dead backup software (which have set unrealistic timeframes for the completion of superstream operations) contribute to the perception that backups take much longer than are necessary or tolerable.  What are your views?
   2. VTLs (loosely viewed as disk target backup platforms) are in increasingly widespread use to address the supposed slow backup issue.  Is a disk buffer a correct solution to the problem of backup windows?
   3. The real issue of backup, of course, is recovery.  With LTO tape requiring something on the order of 3 hours to restore 1 TB of data, is tape increasingly inappropriate for data protection and disaster recovery as some analysts and vendors suggest
   4. Gartner wrote a few years back that 1 in 10 tapes fail on restore.  How much do you think the disk array folks paid for that finding?  Is it all politics, or was there a time when the resiliency of tape media was a real subject of concern?  What has Spectra Logic done to improve the resiliency of tape?
4. Advocates of de-duplication have gone so far as to suggest that tape should be replaced by de-duplicated disk platforms.  SEPATON is actually NOTAPES spelled sideways.  Is de-dupe a threat to tape?
5. From a density perspective and a power perspective, what storage media rival tape?
6. Tape is arguably cheaper than disk from a cost per GB perspective and from a system or platform perspective.  Do you agree with this?  What about from an operational perspective:  is the management of data more or less expensive in terms of labor cost on tape or disk?
7. We are at the SuperComputer show and Spectra Logic seems to be the darling of supercomputing folks I talk to.  Why, in what is arguably the most demanding and data intensive area of computing today, would tape be part of a solution?
8. Spectra Logic has made some additional inroads this year into the broadcast video market:  what is driving your success?
9. Describe the foundations of a Spectra Logic solution:
   a. How has the company innovated in library automation?
   b. In tape management?
   c. In security?
   d. In resiliency?
   e. In capacity/density?
   f. In power consumption?
   g. In cost-efficiency?
10. Now that LTO has become the predominant cartridge format, is tape free of the standards wars and infighting that predominates the disk array space?  How have you avoided the phenomenon that afflicts the disk array vendors, such as the need to add more features to a controller every six months to avoid the appearance of standing still?
11. The T-Finity product is Spectra Logic’s latest rev.  Tell us the key things that make it different from other products in the market?
12. In the late 1990s, all of the leading vendors selling tape subsystems were experiencing flat growth.  SMBs seemed like the market to pursue if you wanted to grow revenue.  Now, to hear disk folks tell it, tape is dead in the SMB market – replaced by cheap and plentiful disk.  One analyst recently told me that the economics and hassles of tape in SMEs militated against the technology in that market.  Yet, Spectra Logic seems to be thriving in vertical markets both at the high and the low end of the market.  What is your view?  Is there a lot of runway ahead for tape?
13. Think we will ever get back to streaming data directly to tape as an operational method of production data storage.
14. How does tape fit with archive?
15. Last year, some LTO vendors were claiming that their security complied with FIPS standards on security.  Yet, AES/GCM did not pass muster with FIPS 140-2 Level 3 standards, reflected by the fact that some were asking NIST for a special exception on the LTO encryption method.  While FIPS only applies to government, many companies are seeking to achieve FIPS compliance because it is the only objective standard available.  Where does Spectra Logic stand on this score?
16. Going forward, what are some of your strongest selling points for your tape products?
17. What has the satisfaction level been with Spectra Logic products?  Are your current customers staying the course?  Do they order more, year over year?  Are they keeping tape in service longer than they expected?  Are they re-committing to the technology?
18. How much of your current success reflects current economic realities?
19. Does cloud woo trump tape?
20. Are capacities keeping pace with demand?

You will get to see Spectra Logic’s responses, plus my interviews with the other Wave 2 sponsors of the C-4 Summit in Cyberspace — not to mention the great videos already done with our Wave 1 sponsors — by Thanksgiving.

Truth be told, I am looking forward to this trip, despite the toll on my 50 year old frame.

Tagged as: ASCDI, FujiFilm, QStar Technologies, Spectra Logic, Storage Decisions, SuperComputer Expo, TAMP Systems, Tek-Tools, Virtual Instruments