Storage Special: Tapes

India Inc. automates its tapes

The Indian secondary storage market is witnessing a shift from low-cost tape drives to network-oriented tape automation products, namely super drives (autoloaders) and libraries, says Akhtar Pasha

Quantum India earned 30 percent of its total revenues from tape automation products in 2002 but it expects to double its revenues from tape automation in 2003, says Mike Sparkes

Any IT manager who has done a backup or restoration process via a tape is painfully aware of the shortcomings of the process. There are some common problems faced by companies using tapes for secondary storage: The first is the long backup window that prevents users from carrying out other activities until the backup is complete. Secondly, disk attached storage (DAS) is still predominant in India and backup is a manual process. A typical manual system consists of a single tape drive connected directly to a server for backup. A network or storage administrator loads and unloads tapes physically while backing up a server. Thirdly, manual systems are prone to human error, with system administrators using tapes out of order. Lastly, the long restoration latency includes searching through stacks of tape cartridges to look for the right tape.

Despite its importance, system or storage administrators are reluctant to backup data due to the labour intensive and time-consuming nature of the task. IT folks have to feed tape cartridges one by one into tape drives; precious time is wasted while waiting for the system to read/write the tape. The solution to this problem is to use tape libraries or autoloaders to automate the backup process.

If your backup needs are always in flux due to explosive growth of storage demand, which is pretty common these days, a tape library can be immensely helpful. A tape library in its simplest form consists of one or more tape backup drives in an enclosure that contains a robotic mechanism for changing tapes. The enclosure will also have magazines or slots to hold tape cartridges. Companies can start out with a dual drive, 20-tape slot tape library, and when their storage needs grow they can add additional drives to the same library, increasing the number of slots in the process. This saves on initial procurement costs and prevents you from getting a unit that you outgrow too quickly.

Business

According to IDC India, the tape automation market, including libraries and autoloaders, was worth $6.8 million in 2002. Libraries accounted for $4.9 million in revenues while autoloaders grossed $1.8 million. HP claims to be the leader in autoloaders and libraries with 19 percent and 29 percent market share by revenue respectively. IBM and Quantum are other key players in this market segment. Naveen Mishra, analyst for Computing Products Research at IDC India says, "The tape automation market is poised for take-off due to concerns about data capacity, backup and disaster recovery. The verticals driving sales of these products are the banking, financial services and insurance sector (BFSI), telecom, IT companies and manufacturing." Mishra expects that both low-end tape automation products and high-end libraries will see increased momentum in the marketplace in 2003. This is where most vendors want to cash in.

While HP still earns a bigger chunk of its revenues from sales of individual drives than it does from selling tape automation products, individual drives have thin margins, making tape automation a more lucrative product category. Therefore, HP wants to focus on automation products—entry-level tape libraries and enterprise class products. Avijit Basu, marketing manager, NSS Group at HP India says, "The tape automation market is expected to grow 40 to 50 percent this year. HP will be strongly focusing on the entry-level MSL 6000 libraries series and the high-end ESL 9000 series in 2003. Here the margins are higher as it involves software and services revenues in addition to hardware sales." HP has already prepared its channel by offering special training to channel partners in deploying and troubleshooting libraries.

Mike Sparkes, product marketing manager-APAC at Quantum Corporation says, "In the last six months we have signed up enterprise customers such as Intel, Orange, Goodlass Nerolac Paints, Hughes Software, Motorola and GE Capital. Quantum India earned 30 percent of its total revenues from tape automation products in 2002 but it expects to double its revenues from tape automation in 2003. Of this, 30 percent will come from large library installations, 5-10 percent from autoloaders and 25 percent from smaller libraries like the M1500."

IBM India wants to focus on the oil and gas sector, where it has ONGC as a customer for its Magstar tape drives used for archiving data and the LTO range of libraries starting from 3580 for entry-level to 3581 high-end libraries. Shailesh Agarwal, country manager-storage at IBM India says, "We are not strong in standalone tape drives as it involves the direct distribution model."

Using tape

A library can change tapes automatically, doing away with the need for manual intervention during backup. A properly configured library can handle your backup needs for days at a time with little intervention from your IT staff. A common use of a tape library is for centralised backup and restore. A tape library can have several tape drives and potentially hundreds of tape cartridges. So you can use a single library to replace tape units attached to dozens of servers. You then run the backup over your LAN or SAN. This can cut down greatly on the daily maintenance needs for backup and free your IT staff for more pressing tasks.

Business drivers

Reduction in backup window: The single biggest selling point in the case of tape libraries is the ability to perform unattended backups. With a tape library, an administrator does not have to monitor the process and change tapes as they reach their recording limit. This means that backups can be performed much faster. Agarwal says, "Companies want to cut backup time to 2-3 hours and do incremental backups of critical data. By reducing the backup window, they are able to retrieve data quickly from the tape during restores."

Smaller cities join the party: Demand for libraries is being felt from ‘B’ class cities such as Coimbatore and Pune. These cities are considered to be hubs for manufacturing companies and are home to numerous small and medium enterprises (SMEs).

Disaster Recovery: Another important factor why companies buy libraries and autoloaders is that they can be used as a cheap medium of disaster recovery. Tape cartridges can be taken to a remote site for safekeeping.

Vertical drivers: Verticals segment such as telecom, BFSI, oil and gas, and manufacturing are contributing to the growth of automation products in India. Agarwal adds "Oil and gas companies such as ONGC and Oil India, besides banks, need to keep two to three years of data alive. Since their archival requirement is high they want a lesser number of drives with multiple libraries so that they can scale up as their data capacity grows."

Eliminates human intervention: By using tape automation products, CIOs can mandate policies to manage drives, doing away with the need for human intervention and thereby human error. In a manual system, an IS team’s productivity goes for a toss as administrators often end up wasting time on tape management. Tape automation results in lower downtime in backup and restoration.

Remote management: Sitting in one location, a storage or network administrator can do serverless or LAN-free backup using a dial-up connection to manage libraries remotely. For instance, HP’s SuperDLT libraries such as SSL1016 utilise Web-based management.

Barcode readers to simplify tape rotation: Even with the implementation of a tape autoloader or library, tape rotation and offsite storage of tapes can be daunting. To facilitate this, many libraries come with a barcode reader. When combined with bar coded tape cartridges and a good software application, much of the backup and restore operation is simplified and the process becomes more accurate.

As both enterprises and SMEs have started shifting to automation products, this is a perfect opportunity for all server and storage vendors to increase margins by selling automation products and solutions.