Your first inclination is to probably consider staying with ‘LIBTYPE=SCSI’ or ‘LIBTYPE=VTL’ as this is what you have today and, well, it works. This approach is fine, it will certainly unlock your new library resources and make them available to TSM but the approach may not be the best fit for your management needs both now and most likely in the future. By selecting ‘LIBTYPE=SCSI’ or ‘LIBTYPE=VTL’ you will need, at a minimum, to check in library volumes as scratch. If you’re adding any new tape devices or a tape library then additional steps apply. These may include defining a library, device class, drives, paths and defining a new or updating an existing storage pool to point to your new library. If you took the step of adding a whole new tape library to the mix, after the administration of ‘plumbing’ the new library into TSM, you will need to manage what data gets sent to the new library and what data get sent to the old library.

As an alternative, you could (and probably should) consider ‘LIBTYPE=EXTERNAL’ and use external library management software such as Gresham’s Enterprise DistribuTape (EDT). ‘LIBTYPE=EXTERNAL’ has several differences over ‘LIBTYPE=SCSI/VTL’ but in this post we will review the differences in ‘plumbing’ a library into TSM and how you can move from an existing ‘LIBTYPE=SCSI’ or ‘LIBTYPE=VTL’ configuration to ‘LIBTYPE=EXTERNAL’. In future blog posts we will review other differences including library consolidation, library partitioning and library performance.

With ‘LIBTYPE=EXTERNAL’ you do not define drives, drive paths or even tape media to TSM. Instead, drives and media are configured to EDT and these resources are given to TSM dynamically when needed. Delving a bit deeper you will find that within EDT you have groupings of drives and libraries – known as “Tape Containers” – that you configure to TSM as an externally managed tape library. To add a drive to EDT you just need to make sure the host operating system (OS) sees the drives, then tell EDT which drives you want in which Tape Container(s). The rest is automatic. EDT will take care of device path management for you, so there is no need to manage or maintain device paths in software. This gives you one way to configure persistent binding no matter which OS or HBA you are using.

Let’s take a closer look at what is involved in setting up an externally managed tape library in TSM. If we are not defining drives and drive paths in TSM, what do we define? 3 (yes, only 3) things:

• A tape library (DEFINE LIBRARY)
• A library path (DEFINE PATH)
• A device class (DEFINE DEVCLASS)

After this, you’re good to go. With EDT, scratch media is not checked in to TSM. Instead, it is allocated to a scratch pool within a Tape Container in EDT that is made available to any TSM system using EDT (once EDT has been given access to same Tape Container). EDT will automatically label blank tapes and automatically check in media after mounting a scratch tape. EDT even allows you to mix drives from multiple libraries into a single TSM library definition. A direct benefit of this is that EDT can, then, provide capacity balancing across libraries to ensure no single tape library is getting overloaded (something particularly helpful in optimizing performance with VTLs).

Sound good? Well, maybe you are wondering what is involved in moving from ‘LIBTYPE=SCSI / VTL’ to ‘LIBTYPE=EXTERNAL’. It’s straight-forward and can be done with almost no interruption to operations (library service). In fact, the interruption time will probably be less than 5 minutes (the average time it takes to export scratch tapes from TSM and set them to scratch in EDT). As soon as you cut over to use EDT, EDT will begin responding to private and scratch mount requests. Here’s a summary of how to make the move from ‘LIBTYPE=SCSI/VTL’ to ‘LIBTYPE=EXTERNAL’ and EDT:

1. Define an external library and library path
2. Install EDT and configure a tape container (can include drives from one or more libraries)
3. Update your device class to point to the new external library
4. Checkout scratch libvolumes from TSM and set them to scratch in EDT
5. Perform a full database backup for the device class you updated
6. Checkout private libvolumes from TSM as they expire and set them to scratch in EDT

Moving to EDT is easy and non-disruptive to operations. Once you’ve made the switch your life as a TSM administrator will be made easier with respect to managing tape environment configuration and responding to changes in demand. You’ll be fighting fewer fires as EDT keeps data paths online, load balanced appropriately and soft-errors from resulting in failed jobs too.

Don’t forget to visit our blog next month where you will learn how your life as a TSM administrator will be easier from a data management point of view.

Tape remains the most cost-effective method of storing data for the mid-to-long term (archive) and it serves as a good secondary copy for backup data for use in disaster recovery (DR) situations and both of those things are unlikely to change any time soon. However, with the exception of continual improvements to the amount of data that can be stored on a single tape cartridge and tape drive speeds, little innovation in the area of tape connectivity or integration into emerging technology solutions have been made. Left unaddressed, this limits the opportunities to use tape particularly in an increasingly virtualized world, which benefits no one other than disk vendors.

The Problem

Tape is poorly integrated into virtual machine (VM) environments due to limited connectivity options. In many cases, currently supported attachment methods are limited to iSCSI and SCSI with SCSI attachment being highly dependent on a limited number of supported and certified Host Bus Adapters (HBAs). Where iSCSI is used, customers must dedicate a tape drive to a virtual machine. This leads to inefficient use of tape devices by VMs and harks back to the days of 1:1 resource dedication that necessitated the creation of approaches to share tape drives between multiple servers to overcome this limitation. Rather than addressing this issue directly, most applications wishing to use tape bypass connectivity to tape within a VM by moving data to a physical server with a disk cache where the data can be aggregated and then pushed to locally attached tape. This architecture requires more servers (at least one non-VM server to which tape can be connected) and disk hardware, which drives up capital and operating costs for users. It also slows the time it takes to protect data (measured by moving data from its origin to final resting place), which may impact a customer’s service level agreements (SLAs). Moving to a pure disk-based data retention scheme is an option albeit an extremely expensive one given that tape is up to 40x more cost effective for long-term data retention than is disk. There needs to be an alternative and soon there very may will be.

The Solution

Gresham created a pseudo tape driver in the early 1990s – DistribuTAPE – that allowed a pseudo device path to be dynamically mapped to a physical device path on either a local or remote machine (think iSCSI on steroids). Fast-forward to today and you will find Gresham repurposing this technology in an effort to solve the VM integration challenge highlighted above as part of project IntelliTape – a tape hypervisor providing a centralized management point for all tape resources within either a public or private cloud or traditional data storage environment. The aspiration is grand but the concept is simple. Install / integrate Gresham IntelliTape on the operating system (OS) running on your VM and gain access to any tape devices under Gresham’s control attached to either a local or remote server, including the server providing the virtualization layer itself. In addition to delivering connectivity to a shared pool of tape resources, IntelliTape is likely to offer benefits found in Enterprise DistibuTape (EDT) like HBA load balancing, data path failover, persistent binding and tape library consolidation. Moreover, it would give users the ability to dynamically reroute backup jobs to remote sites or even a public cloud in response to particular events (e.g. a local resource being unavailable due to hardware failures). While this may sound complicated, as we have done with EDT, we intend to engineer out a lot of the complexity from an end-user perspective to make IntelliTape simple and easy to use. From an application’s perspective, the solution would be transparent. It goes to use a tape drive and Gresham IntelliTape identifies a suitable tape device with which to service the request and dynamically maps the tape drive to a physical device path selected by Gresham IntelliTape. Then, it’s off. This makes sharing tape drives between applications running on a local machine or across the world a matter of ensuring “plumbing” exists where that plumbing can be any combination of Fibre Channel (FC), SCSI or Ethernet. This approach eliminates the connectivity issues within VM environments that exist today without adding additional hardware or disk caches to the mix, which keeps capital costs low and inline with the true cost-efficiencies tape offers. Architecturally, this looks as follows:

The Need Restated

As stated earlier, tape remains one of the most cost effective means of storing data for the mid-to-long term. Moreover, its portability makes it a highly efficient way to transfer large amounts of data between locations in short period of time making it an ongoing competitor in the DR space. As more and more data is created within guest OSes running on virtualized hardware, the need to be able to move that data to appropriate storage locations becomes imperative. Relying on disk storage as an intermediary and, moreover final resting place, is costly particularly when data can be identified as suitable for archiving opposed to backup from the outset. IntelliTape overcomes current limitations in tape connectivity within virtualized environments giving organizations the means to directly write data to tape in a way that makes most efficient use of their underlying tape resources (i.e. it avoids 1:1 tape drive dedication). This keeps costs low while keeping data protection and retention high. Just what is needed for this increasingly virtualized world.

What you get out of the box

TSM provides the following basic support for all tape libraries out of the box:

• Tape library sharing (media and drives)
• Support for a single device path to each tape drive
• Automatic labeling and relabeling of tape media
• Automatic device path discovery with specific SAN HBAs

If you are using an IBM tape library with the IBM Atape driver running on AIX (notice the dependencies here) you get a bit more functionality:

• HBA load balancing
• Data path failover

What you don’t get

• The ability to expand slot count on demand without restarting TSM
• Support for an unlimited number of HBAs
• Support for an unlimited number of data paths to a single tape drive
• HBA load balancing for any non-IBM tape device on any OS other than AIX
• Data path failover for any non-IBM tape device on any OS other than AIX
• Persistent binding of tape device paths irrespective of HBA type
• Tape library sharing without any dependencies on a single tape library management server
• Automatic clearing of tape media from drives following a failed dismount request
• Consolidation of multiple tape libraries into a single logical library
• On demand allocation of tape media (i.e. tape thin provisioning)
• Mount time minimization / data access acceleration
• Support for logical tape library partitioning
• Support for multiple scratch tape pools

Choice

It all comes down to choice. As you can see from the information above, IBM provides you with the bare minimum features you need to use tape in your TSM environment – no more, no less. For leading organizations basic doesn’t cut it. Companies who are surpassing their competition expect the highest reliability, greatest flexibility and optimal performance from their tape environment at all times. This is driven by a need to consistently meet their Service Level Agreements (SLAs) while minimizing operating costs. They succeed because they don’t simply take what comes in the box but rather invest in solutions that deliver their business objectives. That is why products like EDT exist and are currently used by many of the world’s most successful and progressive companies.

Here are a just a few of the things that our clients have told us about how EDT has improved tape management and performance in their environment…

“[we are] delighted to have EDT 10 and eliminate the pain of device management in LAN-Free environments”
— A Top 5 Global Wireless Provider

“v10 has great features and possibilities with huge benefits. EDT v10 will be key to our tape operations in the future.”
– European Bank

“We use EDT v10 to manage our ACSLS and Quantum FC attached tape libraries. EDT gives us a simple approach to managing all our tape libraries that saves us time.”
– Healthcare Company

Download a copy of our document EDT TSM Enhancements to learn more.

Thin provisioning is usually associated with disk and it has become a key feature to enable the efficient use of disk systems. Every major disk system vendor offers some form of thin provisioning and thin provisioning has made its way into virtualization software like VMware. But the application of thin provisioning to the tape world is largely absent (with the notable exception of the fact that we, at Gresham Storage, have been offering tape thin provisioning to TSM users since 1995). So, what makes tape thin provisioning so important and why do solutions that merely share tape fall short of delivering the full benefits of thin-provisioning?

Thin provisioning in a nutshell

What is it?

SearchStorage provides a very concise definition:

• Thin provisioning is the allocation of storage space in a flexible manner among multiple users, based on the minimum space required by each user at any given time.

Wikipedia expands on this somewhat, the highlights being:

• The act of using virtualization technology to give the appearance of more physical resource than is actually available.
• Thin provisioning enables over-allocation / over-subscription of the underlying resource.
• With thin provisioning, storage capacity utilization efficiency can be automatically driven up towards 100% with very little administrative overhead.

Why is it important?

Storage Switzerland points out in its article titled “Thin Provisioning Basics” that “[v]arious studies are available that indicate as much as 75% of the capacity in a medium sized and larger data center is allocated but not written.” 75%! That number implies that many firms may have paid up to 75% more than they actually needed to because they did not size their data storage appropriately and over purchased as a result. Thin provisioning offers the means to address this issue by allowing organization to allocate as much storage as is being requested yet purchasing only a fraction of the allocated amount recognizing that they are probably being asked for 75% more than is actually needed. Simply put, thin provisioning is a technology designed to lower expenditure by improving resource utilization.

How does thin provisioning apply to tape?

Tape is merely another type of data storage resource that is used by organizations and it suffers from the same utilization issues as does disk. Tape has the advantage of being lower in terms of total cost of ownership than disk so the financial impact of having extra tapes lying around may not be as significant to an organization but unused tape capacity still represents an unnecessary cost. An important distinction between disk and tape thin provisioning is recognition of the fact that most tape cartridges offer a single partition – the equivalent of one large disk block – and, as such, a single tape cartridge can only be used by a single application at a time.¹ This means that tape thin-provisioning is unlikely to ever achieve the same level of utilization as disk. Nonetheless, tape thin provisioning lowers costs.

Why can’t applications like TSM claim to offer thin provisioning natively?

Thin provisioning requires that only the minimum space required by each user at any given time be made available. TSM cannot make this claim when it comes to tape because, at a minimum, you would always need to have at least one tape volume available even if that capacity wasn’t required and that tape cartridge would need to be preallocated. I’m sure you are thinking this is a silly example because you would always want to make sure you had at least one scratch tape available at all times and, for a single TSM instance environment, I would agree. But, it proves the point that any time you are required to allocate capacity before that capacity is needed you can no longer claim to offer thin provisioning. Moreover, consider a larger environment where you may have more than one TSM server each serving discrete parts of your operation. In this type of a scenario, you would need to partition your tape library so each independent TSM server had its own resources and then you would need to check those tape resources into TSM for its use. We’re back to the days of likely over allocating capacity that necessitated thin provisioning in the first place.

How does Enterprise DistribuTape (EDT) enable thin provisioning in a TSM environment?

EDT ties into TSM via the External Media Manager Interface (EMMI). This interface allows TSM to request a SCRATCH tape as and when required. EDT identifies an available tape cartridge and drive to satisfy the needs of TSM just in time from a pool of tape cartridges and drives that may be shared with other TSM server instances and / or applications². By allocating tape cartridges to TSM when they are needed (thinly provisioning tape) organization that use EDT can keep fewer tape cartridges on hand thereby lowering costs and driving up effective capacity utilization rates.

¹LTO-5 and Oracle T10KC tape drives and media support more than one partition. This capability may change the nature of how tape can be used today by enabling multi-tenancy.
²EDT is capable of coexisting and sharing tape library resources with any other application. Other applications may, however, report errors if they do not either use EDT’s tape resource allocation facilities or support intelligent tape library resource sharing

First, long term data retention for regulatory reasons will continue to use tape per point #2. Absolutely; we’re in sync there. But, is that data being stored as a backup or an archive? To some extent it depends on what you mean by an archive vs. a backup and what you consider a single copy of data (given that an archive is generally considered the retention of a single copy of data for a prolonged period of time). If, for example, you consider a version of a file to be “unique” data and you have a policy to store only changed versions on a monthly basis then we are really talking about creating an archive vs. storing a backup for a long time. Why might that be important? Well, it goes somewhat to addressing the amount of data that requires storage as backup nearly always creates duplication, triplication, etc of data (the implication being cost even if tape is very cheap at as little as $0.05/GB (provided you aren’t experiencing undue cost overheads associated with improper handling of tape or the lack of optimization of access to tape — EDT to the rescue anyone?)). Moreover, it goes to reinforce the growing messaging that tape is really the archival medium of choice and will be for decades to come while its presence in the backup world will dwindle away as HDD and SSD based backup grows.

Second, the statement “these non-enterprise tapes were at best unreliable formats – they actually gave a lot of fodder to the “tape is dodgy theme” is absolutely true. What baffles me is not the fact that vendors are continuing the life-support of such antiquated drives but the fact that these same vendors who supply enterprise class drives would allow their lower-end offerings to hinder their success with higher margin, more robust technologies. It beggars belief. Something that needs to be addressed amongst tape vendors is their failure to band together to tout the benefits of their technologies as the disk vendors have done.

Lastly, deduplication…I don’t agree that it will not migrate to tape in a meaningful way unless you constrain your thinking to be that you must always move deduplicated data in its deduplicated form to tape. Okay, so now your probably thinking I’m just proving the point. But, wait. What I’m saying is fundamental to the underlying rationale for deduplication in the first place; namely, the elimination of duplicate copies of data. To that end, I think the meaningful move of deduplication to tape will come as a result of software becoming more intelligent so as to effectively build an archive of unique data from deduplicated data combined with a metadata schema that allows a single copy of data to be recovered to its source without needing to be rehydrated. How might this work? Well, LTO-5 and LTFS may help in this area as LTO-5 tape media has gained the ability to be self-describing meaning that the deduplication function that would have previously been handled through a dedupe appliance can now be eliminated through an intelligent metadata store held on the LTO-5 cartridge itself. Taking this approach will enable people to dedupe data on disk and then move it to tape retaining only one hydrated copy of the data on tape; that is how dedupe and tape coexist!

Outside of these comments regarding Preston’s predictions, I also want to mention a prediction of my own: the disparity between the capabilities of tape hardware and backup / archive applications will grow. Already this is happening as companies like SpectraLogic invest in developing extremely large tape systems with significant intelligence yet the way in which applications use and access the library haven’t evolved much beyond the days of the first auto-loaders. This will create a growing opportunity for companies like us to bring solutions to market that close this gap and help end-users tap into otherwise unrealized performance / management improvements. We have been doing this with our Enterprise DistribuTape (EDT) software for years and we keep going from strength to strength. I wouldn’t be surprised if others follow suit.

One such provider following this trend is EMC who recently sponsored a paper by IDC, in which were detailed five reasons that firms are moving away from tape in backup/recovery. The top two reasons cited were poor backup and recovery performance. Other reasons cited were high operation and administration costs and security concerns. All they needed was one simple argument – the real reason that tape is no longer the storage medium of choice for backup/recovery is that servers seem to be multiplying faster than rabbits while often having the performance characteristics of a tortoise and tape is a sequential access, high speed medium while random access is what is needed to backup data efficiently. Moreover, restore plays into the mix too and competing technologies such as disk and solid state are outperforming tape in terms of transfer (particularly read) rates. Recognizing this makes the concept behind the paper a non-starter – everyone knows tape is largely leaving the backup/recovery sector – what benefit (other than creating FUD) does emphasizing this message bring? This paper and others like it read like a character assassination of someone who they would have us believe is on their deathbed. Whether on their deathbed or not, it’s in somewhat poor taste and certainly doesn’t provide any real useful information for customers or the market.

Luckily for the storage industry and consumers, tape is not in fact in its final death-throws. Far from it – tape is set to make something of a comeback thanks to the recent boom in data archiving. And the archive isn’t the only place where tape remains viable; tape’s biggest asset is its cost, or rather lack of it. Tape requires no power or raised floor and offers up to 10 TB of offline storage for around a hundred fifty bucks – keep it on a shelf for ten years and you have a very inexpensive way of keeping offline data around.

Aside from offering low cost offline storage, tapes other asset is portability. What does portability buy you? Well, for one, portability offers a significant bandwidth opportunity out of the data center. If a data center ejects 50 tapes per day (not uncommon) and moves all of those tapes to a location offsite, that is equivalent to transferring 150 TB of data per day offsite (assuming LTO5 with 2:1 compression). This kind of low-cost bandwidth is of real significance for disaster recovery users who need to move vast quantities of data far from its source as quickly as possible. This kind of bandwidth solution will, I think bring us full circle and play an increasingly important role in the archive too; allowing users create vast archives in a hurry and move archives between providers.

So where does that leave us, well, the simple fact is that tape and disk service very different storage requirements. A top-down comparison is useful as it shows how each can service differing needs, however a side-by-side “tick in the box” comparison of disk and tape is disingenuous, does not serve the consumer and frankly tastes a little sour.

The “Big Data” issue

EMC has spent considerable time promoting the phrase “Big Data”, tweaking the term to meet their particular marketing needs. Essentially, “Big Data” exists any time you get so much data, especially in a single data set, that it becomes difficult to manage. Other vendors are jumping on this bandwagon too hoping to capture the ever-increasing amount of money being spent on making “Big Data” immediately accessible and usable. But what about storing large data sets for a prolonged period of time? When “Big Data” consists of petabytes, exabytes or even greater amounts of data, is disk really the right solution? If we were only talking about keeping “Big Data” around for a short period of time then maybe but that isn’t the world we live in where, in a lot of cases, we would like to keep everything forever (Facebook anyone?). So, we face a huge amount of data that grows exponentially with a need to keep it for a long time. Now does disk make sense? If you answered yes, I suspect you either work for a disk vendor or enjoy spending copious amounts of money and keeping power companies in business through outrageous electricity bills … I invite you to read on anyway … No, disk doesn’t make sense when you start talking about keeping data around for a long period of time. That is the world that tape rules and for good reason. Just look at the typical costs for long-term data retention:

Long term data retention costs²

• Tape: As low as $0.02/GB/year; typically around $0.05/GB/year
• Disk: Enterprise-class SATA costs around $0.80/GB/year

These numbers show that even though disk has decreased in cost significantly it is still nearly 16x more expensive than tape for long term archival. Density doesn’t really play into disk’s favor either because while disk density has increased on average 36% since 2000³ seek times have not improved more than 5-10% forcing drives to be used in arrays to achieve equivalent performance improvements driving cost per usable gigabyte up significantly. Tape, during the same period has, increased in density 15x and performance has improved 7x. (LTO-1 to LTO-5 at 100GB@20MB/sec and 1.5TB@140MB/sec respectively)⁴ all without experiencing the same type of usable space problems.

Infrastructure requirements

Disk also faces the challenges of requiring constant power and cooling which creates a scalability issue. After all, at some point a disk-only solution would consume all currently available floor space requiring a new facility in which to house additional disk systems to be built. That n^thdisk system, then, becomes extremely costly and achieving a timely and acceptable ROI can be difficult at best (this is a problem that the “Cloud” faces today even though there seems to be very little talk on this point at present). Tape, by comparison can be stored pretty much anywhere (subject to controlling temperature and humidity, of course) making the facilities to house tape media far simpler and less costly to both build and maintain.

Portability

And then there is the matter of portability… Sure, you can remove a disk from an array, attempt to stick it in a box and move it to an offsite facility as a means of storing data for the long term but with the myriad moving parts inside of an HDD that probably wouldn’t be the best idea. Again, tape does not have this issue. Tape is designed to be portable and this, combined with the facility costs mentioned above, means data can be retained for a long time at relatively low costs and with relatively little risk to the data (assuming it has been handled properly in the first place). Furthermore, data on tape can be moved easily from one facility to another should that requirement arise and it doesn’t require a high-speed massive bandwidth connection to achieve that movement either, which is yet another benefit of tape over disk (and a whole other topic…watch this space).

Reliability

At this point you may be thinking that I am overlooking the issue of reliability because, after all, people will regularly cite tape’s failure rate at 70% or higher⁵. This is largely FUD. Sure, if tape isn’t handled properly then it fails but that is a quality you can ascribe to pretty much anything. For comparison, consider these statistics:

Error rates for various storage mediums⁶

• LTO Tape: 1 bit in 1 x 10E17 bits
• Enterprise Tape: 1 bit in 1 x 10E19 bits
• Desktop SATA: 1 sector in: 1 x 10E14 bits
• Enterprise SATA: 1 sector in: 1 x 10E15 bits
• Enterprise FC/SAS: 1 sector in 1 x10E16 bits

My experiences echo these numbers. Our IT team works with various disk arrays as part of several VMware ESXi deployments and they are regularly replacing hard drives in disk arrays and suffering performance degradations during rebuilds. Contrast that with our experiences using tape where, when proper care has been taken to store data on tape, ensuring error checking was done in the process (which most applications offer), problems with data restoration after the fact are few and far between. Where errors have been detected, which has been seldom, recreating a tape has been easy and the performance impact on other IT systems has been negligible.

In light of all of this, is it really fair to say that tape is dying? Well, maybe because the traditional use of tape is changing and tape drive and media sales are down. But, tape still has a critical role to play in the world of long-term data archival and in that respect it is healthy and has a potentially bright future as the desire to keep everything forever grows (which may even reserve the decline in tape drive and, to a lesser extend media, sales).

If tape is dying it has the same disease as HDD

Given the information presented herein I hope that you can see how tape has the opportunity to not only be a viable medium for years to come but, critically, to address the need for the long term archival of “Big Data” in a cost effective fashion. This is not, however, to say that tape is not at risk of being killed off it is merely to say that the threat, in this author’s opinion isn’t coming from HDD but rather from SSD; that tape and HDD are both fighting the same ailment which may claim the life of both technologies in due course.

Why is SSD the REAL threat?
SSD is a threat to both HDD and tape because it combines the best attributes of both technologies into a single package. SSDs are portable, capable of handling diverse environmental conditions (with the exception of extreme temperatures), can be stored on shelves rather than in arrays, provide extremely high I/O rates, etc. For these vary reasons SSDs are gaining popularity and in a study commissioned by IBM⁷ 47% of respondents were either using or planning to use SSDs in the future. The one thing that is holding SSDs back right now from killing off HDDs and tape is cost. At around $2/GB for mid-range drives (enterprise class being even more expensive)⁸, SSDs leave organizations with the prospect of spending 2.5x times more than if they used HDDs and 40x more than if they were to use tape for the equivalent amount of data storage. With the cost of HDDs and SSDs likely to reach parity far sooner than tape, HDDs should be worried about their longevity. Tape, on the other hand, can breathe a bit easier … at least for now … as it continues to be the most sensible long-term data archival medium.

¹http://www.storagenewsletter.com/news/tapes/tape-is-not-dead-but-dying
²http://www.linkedin.com/groups/is-TAPE-still-being-used-75803.S.54991695?view=&gid=75803&type=member&item=54991695&trk=EML_anet_di_pst_ttle
³http://www.infostor.com/disk-arrays/raid/2010/understanding-the-hidden-costs-of-storage.html
⁴http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open#Generations
⁵Compuquip White Paper
⁶http://www.activearchive.com/content/archive-reliability-tape-vs-disk
⁷http://www.storagenewsletter.com/news/marketreport/ibm-survey-ssd
⁸http://www.anandtech.com/show/4421/the-2011-midrange-ssd-roundup

First, it is important to understand that if your organization has imposed budget restriction on you that have essentially meant that your money has all but dried up, there are things that you can do to continue spending. The only real exception to this might be a situation where you find ways to cut costs and rather than being allowed to reallocate those funds you are merely praised for helping to improve the bottom line. Either way, you are either going to find money that you can spend, hopefully, more wisely or your are going to be hailed as a hero – it’s win-win situation.

How do you get started?

To get started you need to gain a good understanding of your data storage environment. Some questions to help you are:

1. How many tape drives do I have?
2. How many hours per day are those tape drives in use?
3. How much money do I spend on those drives on a monthly basis?
4. How much money do I spend vaulting tape media?
5. Do I have existing bandwidth and connectivity to a remote facility that I could use for electronic vaulting?

These are only a handful of the questions that you might ask but this should give you the basic idea. The important thing here is to understand your assets and the extent to which they are being fully utilized today.

What’s next?

Once you understand how well your assets are being utilized you can begin to ask the question, how can I improve current asset utilization? You may also want to look for products that can help you in this pursuit. Backup Virtualization software such as Enterprise DistribuTape (EDT) provides an excellent opportunity to dramatically improve the utilization of Tier 2 / 3 tape assets. Equally, Backup Virtualization products offer the further benefit of decoupling your tape hardware from your backup application meaning you can make changes to your physical tape resources without negatively impacting your backup application. Of course, this means that you have to ask another question and this is where printing money starts to become a reality.

If you were able to fully utilize all of your tape drives and ensure optimal data transfer rates on a regular basis, would you end up having an excessive number of tape drives? What might the elimination of even a handful of your current tape drives mean to your administrative and annual cost overheads?

For most people, the answer can be startling. It is not uncommon to see a reduction in the number of tape drives that is required upwards of 25%. How much money would you save if you could decommission 25% of your existing tape drives? How much money would you have just printed to be able to invest elsewhere?

How about your existing IP network? Is there bandwidth that could be used to remotely replicate data to one of your other facilities? How much money would you save in being able to eliminate your tape vaulting service? Enterprise DistribuTape enables you to control and consolidate tape resource across your entire environment making remote data vaulting simple. So, not only are you gaining reductions in tape hardware and better utilizing existing Tier 2 / 3 tape assets but you are now able to fully utilize your existing network. Operational capabilities go up, costs from maintaining a complex infrastructure go down.

And this, then, is really the point. If there are inefficiencies in the way that you are using your existing assets you are spending money but in such a fashion as to suggest that you might as well be burning it. When organizations take away your ability to burn any more money, rather than getting upset, see it as an opportunity to find money by addressing those inefficiencies. And, while it will take some of your time to go through the necessary analysis, I can almost guarantee that you won’t regret it. After all, the likelihood is that you are going to find ways to save your company money and that money will be either available to reinvest elsewhere or simply make you a hero for improving the bottom line.

Key Points

• Being in business means spending money. The question is are you spending efficiently?
• Most business have too many assets that aren’t being used efficiently and this costs them more money than need be
• Eliminating inefficiencies saves money (and time) and gives you the ability to make investments elsewhere
• Backup Virtualization is an area in which investment should be considered because it leads to efficiency

Why is location so important?

Providing a safe location to store your data once it has been backed up is arguably as important, if not more so, than doing the backup itself. After all, if you backup your data but can’t get it back you might as well not have backed up in the first place. Now, in terms of what constitutes a safe place for your data is really up to each individual to determine. However, there is one key question that everyone should ask:

If a fire, flood or other cataclysmic event occurred wiping out the source of my data is my backup in a different location?

And, this is why location is of such importance. Just because you have backed up your data does not mean that in the event of a true disaster (not just a personal disaster in the sense of “I’ve lost my PowerPoint presentation and I only have 5 minutes until the big presentation”) you will be able to recover unless you have taken note of the location issue. This is also why disk-based backup, for all of its merits of improved backup performance and quicker restore times, is not disaster recovery compliant (at least not if you agree with the statement regarding location). That is not to say that disk-based backup can’t work. Rather, it suggests that if you are going to rely on disk-based backups you may need to consider data replication technologies that will allow you to create a copy of that data on another disk system in another location. Of course, this is probably going to be quite a costly approach not only from the hardware perspective but also taking into consideration power, cooling, floor space, etc. Another option, albeit seemingly passe these days would be to use tape.

Tape, unlike disk (and I am excluding SSD for the time being), is portable. Given this, when you complete a backup to a tape cartridge you can take it to another site thereby satisfying the question of location. Tape, then, becomes one of the simplest ways of being able to legitimately claim that by simply backing up your data you are ready for disaster recovery. And, it’s cheap. Some sources have cited tape-based backup solutions as being upwards of 23 times more cost effective than disk-based equivalents. This is not to say that tape does not have its issues since there is certainly many cases that can be made for the relative fragility of tape compared to disk. Yet, it should not be denied that tape does offer a shorter and more cost effective route to disaster recovery preparedness.

In the end, whether your preference is to use disk or tape backup (or a combination of both) never lose site of the fact that just because you have backed up your data doesn’t mean you a ready for a disaster. Only when you can lay your hands on the media that holds your data when the data source has been obliterated can you truly say you are prepared. If you keep that in mind when the time comes you will be ready.

I want to challenge the wisdom of this way of working and suggest that not only does such a mentality hinder your organization’s ability to procure the best products at the most competitive prices but it often leads to an overall poorer experience in the short, medium and long term. And, it is really that post-sale experience where I think things begin to unwind quickly because, if we are honest with ourselves, when has technology worked perfectly? So, it isn’t a matter of if you are going to have to call upon your vendor to help you resolve a problem but a matter of when. How they respond should speak volumes to the true value the company delivers.

Who answers the phone when you call?

If you are accustomed to working with large organizations you are likely used to someone picking up the phone, taking your details, asking you what is wrong and telling you that someone will get back to you. If you are lucky, you might get a bit better service and be subjected to a list of questions to determine if your problems falls into the list of problems that your vendor already knows about and has a documented solution for. Okay, you might get your problem resolved but it will probably take more time than need be and you almost certainly won’t come away feeling like your vendor sees you as an individual or a particularly special client. But, isn’t that something that you should expect!
The advantage that firms like Gresham Storage Solution offers clients is the ability to be as responsive to your needs as a large firm while never losing sight of the importance of giving customers the sense that they are unique and their business is valued. It is a relationship that extends well beyond the initial sale. It is the recognition that every client is valuable and every relationship must be treated with the utmost care to ensure that relationship is retained. You may think that this is an obvious statement driven by some sense that smaller businesses are dependent on a limited client base and therefore cannot afford to be losing customers but you might be surprised to find that in many cases you would be wrong. Gresham Storage Solutions, for example, serves numerous Fortune 500 and Global 2000 accounts. We have customers in many of the countries around the world. If we lost a customer it would not put us out of business or hamper us. Despite that fact, we don’t take our customers for granted. Each client is important, not because they are another dollar on the revenue line but because they have instilled their trust in us and our products to improve their operations and lower their operating costs; to become a trusted partner; a trust that we do not want to break.

How does your vendor respond when problems happen?

As I already said, chances are almost 100% that it is not a matter of if you are going to have a problem with a system you have bought but a matter of when. Therefore, it is imperative that you have confidence in your vendor’s ability to respond to your issues in a timely fashion and resolve them equally quickly. Here is another time when I would suggest that bigger does not mean better and, in fact, usually means quite the opposite.

Think back to that call you made to your three-letter vendor (i.e. EMC, IBM, etc) asking them to come on site, how long did that take? I am guessing that you will say that they were really quick but what did they do when they got there? Did they spend the time to understanding your problem and resolve it or did they spend the time to determine that it wasn’t their problem and told you to call someone else? I am guessing that it was probably the latter. This is yet another difference that more agile and responsive businesses offer over bigger organizations – the willingness to go beyond the confines of our own little section of real estate in a customers environment and explore where else the problem might lie; to uphold the spirit of the partnership with the customer that is based on knowing that when the going gets tough both parties are fully committed to seeing things through to resolution. Gresham Storage Solutions prides itself on approaching every problem with this degree of commitment and care. It is what sets us apart and makes us the trusted adviser of Fortune 500 accounts.

Do you have that confidence in your vendor? Do you receive that level of customer service? If you do, congratulations. If you don’t, you are probably being served by some large organization that is happy to take your money and tell you that they will be there for you when you need them most but when put to the test will likely fail to live up to your expectations. The easy way to avoid this type of bad experience, spend time understanding what your vendor is really willing to do for you; whether they really want to and can be a trusted adviser.