The Benefits of Enterprise-Class in a Small Form Factor. Determining Whether Enterprise Class in a Smaller Library is the Right Choice

Transcription

1 The Benefits of Enterprise-Class in a Small Form Factor Determining Whether Enterprise Class in a Smaller Library is the Right Choice May 2014

2 Contents Abstract... 3 Introduction... 3 Should Your Organization Use TS Technology in a Smaller Tape Library?... 4 Enterprise-Class vs. Commercial-Grade in Small Form Factor Library... 5 Reliability of Enterprise-Class vs. Commercial... 6 Compelling Roadmap Gains... 8 Reusing Previous Generation Cassettes... 8 Digital Computer Tape... 8 Advantages of Digital Tape Media... 9 Conclusion Copyright 2014 Spectra Logic Corporation. BlueScale, Spectra, SpectraGuard, Spectra Logic, TeraPack, T Finity, and TranScale are registered trademarks of Spectra Logic Corporation. ArchiveGrade, BlackPearl, IntraCloud, and ntier Verde are trademarks of Spectra Logic Corporation. All rights reserved worldwide. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners. All library features and specifications listed in this white paper are subject to change at any time without notice. The Benefits of Enterprise-Class in a Small Form Factor 2

3 A B S T R A C T The density and reliability of commonly used commercial-grade technology tapes and drives (LTO) is the right choice for many organizations. Until recently, it was the only option for organizations using smaller libraries. However, those organizations now have a choice. Enterprise TS Technology, with its higher density, reliability, and read/write performance, is becoming more widely available, not only in large libraries but in small form factor libraries as small as 28 rack units of data center space. These drives provide much greater reliability, faster data read/write performance, as well as a roadmap that shows significant gains in capacity and performance with every generation. Organizations with smaller libraries should consider the benefits of switching to enterprise drives and tapes. I N T R O D U C T I O N The massive growth of data is evident and the numbers are staggering: Like the physical universe, the digital universe is large by 2020 containing nearly as many digital bits as there are stars in the universe. It is doubling in size every two years, and by 2020 the digital universe the data we create and copy annually will reach 44 zettabytes, or 44 trillion gigabytes. (EMC, 2014) 1 While data is growing exponentially, budgets are not. Organizations need scalable, reliable storage to house and back up all of their critical data. Enterprise class digital tape libraries are able to provide just that. Enterprise Class is hardware and software designed to meet the demands of a large organization. What is enterprise class? SearchCIO defines enterprise class or Enterprise IT, also known as enterprise class IT, is hardware and software designed to meet the demands of a large organization. In comparison to consumers and small companies, an enterprise has greater requirements for availability, compatibility, reliability, scalability, performance and security, among other things. 2 In the past, using an enterprise class tape library meant purchasing a large tape library, usually in the 500+ slot range. Today, enterprise class reliability and performance is available in much smaller libraries and many organizations are seeing the need for enterprise class reliability, As well as benefits such as increased performance and a roadmap showing promise for rapid advances, in more compact tape libraries. Figure 1 shows relatively small configuration of a traditional enterprise-class tape library and the more compact 28U in a standard data center rack T Digital Universe Study 2014, EMC, in conjunction with IDC. 2 Definition enterprise IT (enterprise class IT), by Margaret Rouse, SearchCIO, June, 2013 The Benefits of Enterprise-Class in a Small Form Factor 3

4 Figure 1: Traditional enterprise-class tape library and T380 S H O U L D YOUR ORGANIZATIO N USE TS T E C H N O L O G Y I N A S M A L L E R TAPE L I B R A R Y? Organizations need to ask: Do I need an enterprise class tape library with a small footprint, or is commercial grade sufficient for my purpose, saving my budget for other items? Organizations need to ask: Do I need an enterprise-class tape library with a small footprint, or is commercial-grade sufficient for my purpose, saving my budget for other items? Many organizations have multiple locations, with a centralized structure, or main data center. Organizations with enterprise class libraries at the large corporate data center can take advantage of smaller footprint, enterprise class libraries in more remote or satellite operations. Storing the data locally, then, sending tapes back to the large data centers, allows great flexibility as the tapes can be read in either location, and yet the highest level of data integrity is maintained and the organization knows its data will be available when needed. To consider whether to use TS Technology, consider the following questions: Is this a remote application and will my digital tape cartridges from this system be interfacing with a larger system in a corporate data center? (If so, what drive class does the larger library utilize?) Does this application need to be very cost effective (LTO drive based) or highly reliable (TS Technology based)? Will the tape library be deployed in a highly demanding, high duty cycle environment (TS Technology recommended), or will it be significantly less than a 24x7x365 application (LTO recommended)? The Benefits of Enterprise-Class in a Small Form Factor 4

5 Will the application require the highest level of throughput and fast read/write/seek capability (TS Technology recommended), or will LTO performance be acceptable? Is high capacity and performance important in the future, with tape cartridge reformatting capability important (TS Technology recommended), or will the LTO roadmap be sufficient? Will my application need the absolute best density in the smallest rack space possible (TS Technology recommended), or will the density of the LTO T380 be sufficient (still better than any competitor library in its class)? The following sections provide more information about the benefits of TS Technology, and of using it in a smaller library. E N T E R P R I S E-CLASS VS. COMMERCIAL - G R A D E I N SMALL FORM FACTOR L I B R A R Y As one can see from Error! Reference source not found., enterprise-class drives were previously only available in larger configurations, taking up multiple racks. Now with the T380, enterprise-class is available in just over a half of a data center rack. Error! Reference source not found. shows the difference in high-level performance and capacity specifications. The T380 with TS1140 shows modest overall capacity gains (great gains on a per slot basis), but substantial throughput gains. It is anticipated that TS1150 Technology will provide substantial gains in all categories. Table 1: High-Level Specification Comparison of T380 with TS1140 and TS1150 Technology and T380 with LTO Tape Drives Library T380 with TS1140 Technology T380 with TS1150 Technology T380 with LTO-6 Technology Max Drives Max Slots Throughput Native TB/Hr Throughput Compressed TB/Hr Capacity Native TB 1, , Capacity Compressed TB 2, , ,375.0 Rack Space U Density Native TB/U Density Compressed TB/U The Benefits of Enterprise-Class in a Small Form Factor 5

6 Error! Reference source not found. points out some important differences. Not only is there 9.9% additional capacity (projected to be at least a 174.7% increase with TS1150 Technology), there are 119 fewer cartridges to manage and fewer slots to license, for both the tape library and also software applications. Overall support costs will also be reduced by the fewer slots. The better throughput performance of the TS1140 Technology Drives means that data can be read and written over 50% faster than with LTO Drives. Expected in late calendar Q4 of 2014, TS1150 Technology drives will The device bandwidth supports the largest data sets imaginable by customers. Alternatively, another way to look at it is that the same amount of work can be done with fewer drives two TS Technology Drives can do the same work as three LTO Drives. The TS Technology Drives provide faster access to data, with average file access time of 37 seconds vs. 61 seconds for LTO Drives. The TS Technology Drives also have a high speed search with direct to file.? While there are some noticeable differences in the table, there are also some additional key differences not apparent in the table. The TS Technology Drives provide faster access to data, with average file access time of 37 seconds vs. 61 seconds for LTO Drives. The TS Technology Drives also have a high speed search with direct to file, using High Definition Tape Directory and position sensing. Multiple copies of the High Resolution Tape Directory (HRTD) are stored on the tape, and a low-resolution version in the cartridge memory. The HRTD is not required to read data from tape and is automatically rebuilt on read operations in case all other copies are unreadable. The T380 is a compact digital tape library and can be used in applications where space is limited. Many organizations have found that it is ideal for use in remote offices, where tapes can be saved, then, sent to a corporate office for longer-term backups or archival uses. In these applications, it is important to consider the tape drive technology being used in the corporate office or main data center. If an organization chooses to use enterprise-class drives in the corporate or main IT data center, it may have a mismatch, when it wants to load and read tapes from a remote site, if the site uses LTO tape drives. The compact, yet enterprise-class T380 solves this problem, by allowing either TS Technology or LTO drives at remote sites. R E L I A B I L I T Y O F E N T E R P R I S E-CLASS VS. C O M M E R C I A L An additional difference between drive types is the reliability. TS1140 Technology provides the T380 with unsurpassed reliability. While the reliability of T380 with LTO tape drives is excellent, with better error rates than enterprise-class disk, the reliability of T380 with TS1140 Technology is 1,000 times better. The bit error rate (BER), or amount of data written in which only 1 bit is expected to fail, is 11,102 PB with TS1140 Technology vs PB with LTO Drives. The higher BER is critical for customers storing their data on just a single copy, as well as data used in hypercritical applications. See summary in Table 2. The Benefits of Enterprise-Class in a Small Form Factor 6

7 Table 2: Disk and Tape Hard Error Rates 3 Device Hard error rate in bits Equivalent in bytes PiB equivalent SATA consumer (Disk) 1 x x SATA Enterprise (Disk) 1 x x Enterprise SAS/FC (Disk) 1 x x LTO (Tape) and some 1 x x Enterprise SAS SSDs (Solid State Disk) Enterprise TS11xx (Tape) 1 x x , * Note: 1 PiB = 1 Pebibyte, or approximated 1.13 petabytes (PBs) Figure 2: LTO-6 Digital Tape Drive (commercial-grade) and TS1140 Technology Digital Tape Drive (enterprise-class) The TS1140 Technology Drive also has self-monitoring, which virtually eliminates digital tape damage. A second computer processing unit (CPU) acts as a watchdog to prevent data loss. It detects potential errors, before the media in tape cartridges are damaged, from the drive snapping or ruining the tape. In addition, the Virtual Backhitch feature prevents the drive from starting and stopping too often and a feature called Speed Matching reduces the amount of starting and stopping, preventing wear and tear on both the tape cartridges and tape drives. The more reliable TS1140 Technology drives are also designed for constant 24x7 use. They contain more read/write heads, so it takes fewer passes to fill a tape with data, thereby reducing tape wear. It has been designed with incredibly durable components, for maximum uptime heavy duty motors and heads, etc. The cartridge loading mechanism of the TS1140 Technology Drive is rated at 300,000 load/unload cycles vs. the still impressive 100,000 load/unload cycles of the LTO Drive. In addition, the TS1140 tape cartridge has been reinforced, reducing potential damage in high duty-cycle environments. The tape head life of the TS1140 Drive is 75,336 tape motion hours vs. 60,000 tape motion hours for the LTO Tape drive, which is 25% better and produces a life of 8.6 years vs. 6.8 years at 100% duty cycle. 3 Comparison of LTO and Enterprise, Instrumental, Inc. April 19, 2013 The Benefits of Enterprise-Class in a Small Form Factor 7

8 C O M P E L L I N G R O A D M A P G A I N S The enterprise or TS Technology drives consistently deliver significant gains in capacity and performance with every subsequent generation. In fact TS1140 Technology Drives saw a 300% increase in capacity over TS1130 Technology drives (1 TB to 4 TB). This is about a 2x capacity increase over LTO drives. In terms of performance, TS1140 Technology Drives saw a 50% performance increase over TS1130 Technology drives. The future of enterprise class drives looks very promising, as IBM previously demonstrated 35 TB tape cartridges technology in the lab. Moreover, Fujifilm has announced technology demonstrations of 154 TB tape with in IBM 5 and Sony has announced a demonstration of 185 TB tape technology, also in partnership with IBM 6. 7 While these research and development prototypes are still years away, they are encouraging and show that tape is nowhere near its limits. R E U S I N G PREVIOUS GENERATIO N C A S S E T T E S The TS Technology enterprise class drives provide something the commercial grade drives are unable to offer the ability to reformat prior generation tape cartridges. Reformatting TS Technology cassettes offers 60% more capacity and 25% greater throughput, without buying new tape cartridges. While the LTO drives can read back two generations and write back one generation, the tape cartridges are not able to be reformatted for additional capacity and performance. D I G I T A L COMPUTER T A P E Most data-intensive environments, including the media an entertainment industry, use tape for longer-term retention. Of the zettabytes of data generated and replicated in 2011, over 70 percent were stored on tape. 4 How World's Data Is Stored Other Storage - Not on Tape Stored on Tape Figure 3: Graphical depiction of the estimated proportion of world s data saved on digital tape 4 Fred Moore. Tape Storage Future Directions and the Data Explosion. Horison, Inc. accessed February The Benefits of Enterprise-Class in a Small Form Factor 8

9 A D V A N T A G E S O F D I G I T A L TAPE MEDIA Tape has many unsung features that work well for video content storage. Along with providing affordable, long-term storage, tape is highly reliable, and has a low total cost of ownership compared to disk. It also scales affordably and easily, and is very secure through options such as automatic copy and encryption. Costs: It costs less to purchase digital tape systems. Often costs are onethird and in some analyses as little as one-seventeenth of the acquisition costs of a disk subsystem. 5 According to a study by the Clipper Group comparing the cost of tape and disk systems, tape is a fraction of the cost of the same amount of disk. 6 Power Use: There are two types of organizational expenses associated with data center expenditures Capital Expense (Cap Ex), which is the initial purchase of equipment; and, Operation Expense (Op Ex), which are the ongoing expenses that are associated with data center equipment. Digital Tape, in addition to the Cap Ex benefits also has Op Ex benefits. Digital tape requires far less data center power than disk requires to power and cool the same amount of storage. According to a 2010 study by the Clipper Group, disk requires as much as 238 times the energy expenditure for tape, when factoring in power use and cooling requirements over each subsystem s lifespan. 7 The same study reported that the energy cost alone for disk approaches the total cost of ownership for tape. Tapes draw no power at all when the library is not in use. Scalability: One of the perhaps unexpected features of digital tape storage is its incremental and correspondingly affordable scalability. Adding one LTO-6 tape adds 2.5 terabytes (TB) or one TS1140 Technology cartridge adds 4.0 terabytes (TB) to a tape subsystem, with typical costs for LTO and TS media in the pennies per GB range. Security: Tape by nature is secure because it is offline as soon as it is written and stored. Storing tapes in a library, as opposed to outside of a library, is sometimes referred to as nearline storage. Nearline storage protects tape from the traditional risks associated with a disk subsystem, including viruses, hard bit errors, and disk failures during rebuilds. While the time to retrieve content from a tape may be a few minutes slightly longer than it takes to retrieve from a disk drives the data remains secure until you need it, and can quickly be copied to disk for quick access. 5 Information Storage Industry Consortium (INSIC). op. cit., p Ibid., p David Reine and Kahn, Mike. In Search of the Long Term Archiving Solution Tape Delivers Significant TCO Advantage over Disk. Clipper Notes, Report #TCG R. accessed February The Benefits of Enterprise-Class in a Small Form Factor 9

10 Encryption: Digital Tape offers varying levels of encryption, from simple (with a single encryption key) to advanced (tens of thousands of encryption keys). Encryption ensures that if a tape cartridge gets in the wrong hands, it will be useless and not compromise, as the data on the tape will not be readable by anyone other than the intended user the one with the key. Active Archiving: Digital tape is used for actively archiving data in the media and entertainment and in the high-performance computing markets. This proven archiving method extends a file system so that you can find data that is on disk and on tape in the same way. Active archiving supports rapid access to data on disk as well as relatively rapid access to data on digital tape. Using a data mover application, you can automatically move older data to tape, where the tape is written and then stored in the library. To retrieve content, simply issue a command. Extra Copies and Off-Siting: Digital tape is excellent for making extra copies of data and putting copies of the data off-site. Many organizations have smart disaster recovery plans, which include making additional copies of their data and moving those copies to different locations. This isolation of the data adds another level of security to the data, should something happen to the organization s on-site data center. Free or low-cost encryption ensures that no one, other than the organization can access the data. Some advanced software in digital tape libraries can even detect and report if a digital tape has been loaded in another digital tape drive. C O N C L U S I O N Enterprise-class quality technology, formerly only available in large libraries, is now available in smaller, more affordable libraries such as the Spectra Logic T380. Users who need enterprise-class reliability, speed, and capacity can choose the right size library for their storage needs. Both versions of the Spectra T380 are excellent and meet the needs of users in the 50 to 380 digital tape cartridge slot range. The Benefits of Enterprise-Class in a Small Form Factor 10

11 Deep Storage Experts Spectra Logic develops deep storage solutions that solve the problem of long term storage for business and technology professionals dealing with exponential data growth. Dedicated solely to storage innovation for more than 35 years, Spectra Logic s uncompromising product and customer focus is proven by the largest information users in multiple vertical markets globally. Spectra enables affordable, multi decade data storage and access by creating new methods of managing information in all forms of deep storage including archive, backup, cold storage, cloud, and private cloud. For more information, please visit (Fax) Lookout Road Boulder, CO USA spectralogic.com