Rapid advances in secondary storage

Vendor Accent

With data growing at 70 percent a year, and additional factors like cyber crime, natural disasters and new compliance regulations, the pressure on secondary storage has increased, observes Sunny John.

In most organisations today, data protection management solutions are a combination of primary storage disks, secondary storage disks, tapes and software. Live data that must be available 24/7 is totally different to historical data that may or may not be accessed some time in the future. So both tape and disk will continue to co-exist in corporate networks for many years to come to deal with different levels of complexity—with tape-based solutions for backup, recovery and archive, and disk-based solutions for high-speed access to more active data.

Tape has been the cornerstone of customers’ data backup, recovery and archive process for more than 50 years. Though industry forecasts show flat demand for tape over the next five years, the market is still worth US $5 billion a year. Gartner says that four years from now, 20 percent of all data recoveries will still be from tape. The rumours of the death of tape are greatly exaggerated, and major manufacturers continue to invest in different media, including new tape-based solutions.

Today, tape is still the most cost-effective solution for remote and offline storage, and tape technology continues to make rapid progress, particularly in terms of capacity, density, performance and cost. For example, a tape automation product launched just a few weeks ago offers 134 percent more capacity, 1,100 percent more speed and 595 percent more density compared to an equivalent product launched three years ago. The cost per gigabyte was US $4.80 three years ago, and today is down to only 50 cents.

As storage area networks (SAN) become prevalent and companies start to implement tiered storage architectures, tape will be required to deliver even stronger capacity offering as much as 10 terabytes per cartridge, while maintaining SAN-ready speeds. It is also expected that these multi-terabyte devices will cost less than US $1000, or just pennies per gigabyte.

Additionally, there will be major improvements in manageability, functionality as well as security—new encryption features and enhanced administrative controls, at the media, device and system levels including better physical controls.

Demand for the new generation of DLT/SDLT and LTO tape drives is rising along with mid-range drives, autoloaders and compact libraries. Researcher, Robert Baird’s report says that 40 percent of end users plan to increase their spending on tape products this year compared to 2004.

The events of ‘9/11’ have had a major influence on corporate thinking, forcing most right-minded organisations to buy the ‘insurance’ of disaster recovery systems delivered on tape. Tape’s removability, portability and durability will continue to make it a critical element of the data protection infrastructure, and as both government regulations and business needs require companies to store more data for longer periods of time, most companies will continue to use tape for longer-term storage and archive.

In some industries, tape-based solutions are even attracting new users—e.g. for primary storage and data protection for professional video, surveillance and mass data collection.

There is also room for new types of disk-based solutions which complement tape—for example, virtual tape, which offers an integrated disk and software solution that is easy to manage and optimised for use in conjunction with tape. New data compression technologies make virtual tape even more attractive to users.

New diagnostic tools, which monitor drive and media health, and provide a level of predictive failure capabilities, also make virtual tape much more attractive, along with new features that help with compliance.

Some analysts suggest there’s a battle between different formats within the tape sector but the fact is that LTO will co-exist with SDLT in the same way as tape-based and disk-based solutions because they meet a range of different customer data protection needs.

For customers seeking a reliable, high-capacity drive, SDLT (or DLT-S) is the optimum solution because it is particularly well suited to disk-to-tape environments where customers need high capacity rather than high-speed performance. For end users looking for high-speed performance, LTO may be a better solution.

No matter how storage technology evolves over the next few years, most users will need a more balanced approach. Tape will continue to play a key role in data protection, and users who pursue Information Lifecycle Management or a tiered-storage model will need different tiers of storage, matched to data at different stages of its lifecycle, with disk-based backup products providing rapid access to more recent data and tape providing offline copies of data.

The author is Country Manager, Quantum India. He can be reached at sunny.john@quantum.com