#lto7

As we look back upon 2016, the year has seen many worldly events occur (Rio Olympics, Brexit, Zika Virus, Cubs win World Series, LTO-7 hits the streets – among many others!), but its not until you actually sit down and contemplate/calculate how much content you’ve got sitting on all those LTO-5 tapes do you realize that you’ve got some very important work ahead.

As the LTO roadmap moves steadily forward, your timeframe for successfully moving that content onto faster, denser storage is shrinking. With each passing day without a plan, you’ve lost valuable time in the race to complete a job that ultimately never ends – data migration.  In case you have not heard, the LTO roadmap provides 2 generations of backwards compatibility (see chart here) – its something you’ve been told I’m sure. But now’s the time to “wake up and smell the coffee” as they say.  You need a plan, but why?

1. LTO 7 - Keep your content readily available

If you don’t migrate your content forward, the chances of it not being accessible get higher as time passes and that is a scary thing to think about in today’s age of content re-purposing.  Let’s face it, all hardware is prone to failure over time - and if/when the day arrives when your LTO-5 drive no longer works and there is limited ability to source a new one - you are SOL and all the content on those LTO-5 tapes will not be easily accessible.  Sure you could go buy yourself a “brand new” LTO 6 drive, but that will only get you so far and with LTO 8 on the horizon, why buy into an intermediate band-aid?

2. LTO 7 - Consolidate content

With LTO 7 firmly established as a cost, performance and capacity leader in today’s storage arena it makes perfect sense to make the move. Doing so will allow you to consolidate all that content from LTO 5 tapes onto roughly one fourth the number of LTO 7 tapes.  Imagine the shelf space you could save – ultimately making room for much more content all being written to brand new LTO 7 tapes. You can now hold a single project’s worth of content on a single tape – much easier for organizing as well as distribution.

3. LTO 7 – Save money by taking advantage of higher speeds and greater capacity

LTO 7 capacity per cartridge is 6TB, providing highly reliable storage at just $.02 per GB (read more here), while the increase in speed of LTO 7 drives delivers 300MB/sec throughput.  These numbers are hard to ignore – even before that cup of coffee.  Not only are you saving money on the actual storage, you will save valuable time (remember time=money) by being able to complete jobs in half the time, or maybe a better way to see it - double your productivity!

Over the past several years, there has been a trend in the professional media marketplace which has resulted in LTO tape usage being relegated to purely Archival and Disaster Recovery duties – while shifting daily backup duties to inexpensive spinning disk solutions.  A big reason for this is that media entities are being inundated by more and bigger content and LTO along with traditional HSM architectures have been unable to keep pace with this deluge of content.

Some food for thought when considering spinning disk storage as your back up:

Consider that NAS vendors are making low cost systems by packing cheap, high-density disks in them. These drives are 8TB - 10TB, and are configured in various RAID profiles. Now consider what happens when a single 10TB hard drive fails. The RAID rebuild time will run for many hours, possibly days, because the drives are so large. As the RAID rebuild is occurring, you keep your fingers crossed and hope that another drive doesn’t have an issue. The RAID controller is busy rebuilding while you are vulnerable to a complete data loss scenario.

It takes only one of these incidents to realize that while cheap disk storage might seem like a great working copy, it cannot replace the safety of an LTO copy.

Now consider another point - LTO-7 can push 300 MBs on a single drive. If I used multiple LTO-7 drives, my restore time is many times faster than a RAID rebuild.

We believe LTO-7 (especially multiple LTO-7 drives) with a small fast online storage tier (e.g. SSD) is going to present a new alternative to HDD based systems. It enables a safer, faster, more scalable, and a more cost effective storage option.

Tape long held the top spot for archiving until over time it was replaced by disk for daily backups in the world of IT. Today, tape becomes relevant again with LTO-7.

Why Disk Replaced Tape for Backups

Disk gradually started replacing tape for backups about 10-15 years ago. This happened due to a combination of reasons.

LTO was slow: At that time, LTO was at a generation where tape performance was very slow. However, disks in RAID configuration were providing a strong combination of random IO and bandwidth.

Distributed Backup: Distributed backup was popular where organizations were attempting to backup thousands of laptops, desktops, servers and these backups were required to complete in 24-hour periods. LTO based systems, which were serial access struggled to keep up with a massive number of parallel backup streams. Once again, disk arrays (being random access) were able to cope with this far better.

LTO was problematic: LTO was at its infancy at that time. This resulted in environments where backups often failed due to tape or robotic failures. This gave LTO a “bad rap”. Disk, on the other hand, faired far better than LTO with fewer moving parts.

Why Tape is Becoming Relevant for Backup

In our last blog post we highlighted how LTO tape with LTO generation 7 has reinvented itself. These factors along with a change in how data is generated and stored makes tape highly relevant for a number of backup scenarios. Key factors driving LTO relevance in backup are:

Centralized Primary Storage: Most organizations have migrated away from local storage to centralized NAS and SAN storage. Especially in media, users now have a choice of SAN and NAS storage platforms at price points starting as low as $10,000 USD. The distributed backup model which is problematic for tape is now being replaced by centralized storage, which is a better fit for LTO tape (esp. LTO-7 with 300 MB/s) as data can be backed up in a single large stream.

Big Data: The world is creating a lot more data. This data is largely unstructured and while organizations need to keep it around, it does not inherently justify being stored on expensive disk based systems. While vendors argue the benefit of disk based systems (e.g. object storage) for big data archival, it is still 4x-5x more expensive than LTO-based library systems. With LTO-7’s performance, it is more conceivable to store this big data on tape (due to cost efficiencies) and quickly retrieve data when needed.

Faster, Denser LTO tapes: What was considered a slow storage medium (e.g. LTO-2) has matured into a high performance storage platform with LTO-7. LTO-7 drives can keep up and are often faster than primary SAN and NAS systems. Additionally, LTO-7 now packs a density of 6TB/cartridge allowing densities of 500 TB in a 5U rack space (e.g. DNAevolution Infinity 80 slot automation library). These improvements allow for LTO-7 to keep pace with nightly backups of multi-TB primary NAS and SAN environments.

Conclusion

More data often means adding more disk to the primary storage environment, which means adding more tape or secondary disk storage to the backup environment.  It seems like storing and protecting business-critical data should be easier in this day and age.

Tape is a tried and true solution to a new, emerging challenge.  While there are several misconceptions that it is slow and unreliable, LTO technology is reinventing tape usage with new features that you might not know about, as featured in a recent ESG Lab Review Report*. 

3 NEW THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT TAPE

1. Tape is really fast.

When you compare the raw speed data of tape with the raw speed of disk, tape is actually much faster.  Often, the disk transfer times that you are most familiar with do not factor in the complicated backup processes that are associated with disks.  Tape has a relatively simple process for writing data and because of that, reduces transfer time.

LTO-7 Ultrium high-capacity magnetic tape storage technology is capable of storing 15TB of data on a single cartridge with up to 750MB/s transfer rate[1].  Each generation of LTO performs significantly better than the last in terms of performance and capacity.  Even earlier versions (LTO-3) are faster than a typical 7,200 RPM disk drive (130 MB/s).

2. Tape is quite versatile.

When you realize that LTO is mapped out with defined capacity and capabilities all the way to LTO-10, it is obvious that tape is not a lost solution.  

New improvements are being made on a continual basis.  For example, the introduction of the Linear Tape File System (LTFS) in LTO-5 used partitioning for easy data retrieval by dividing the tape into separate writable areas.  LTFS works with the LTO and media technology to make the device look like a typical storage device to the underlying operating system.  Once it is setup, files can be simply copied to and from the device just like any disk drive.  With expanded functionality, organizations are using LTO for both tertiary and even primary storage.

As always, tape is an inexpensive, portable storage solution that plays nicely with other storage solutions like disk and cloud storage.

3. Tape is very reliable.

Reliability in tape-based data storage solutions is all about accessing data when you need it. LTO media was designed to be loaded into a device, written to, removed, moved, stored, recalled and reloaded into a device whenever data is needed.

LTO media reliability, introduced in the LTO-3 format design and continuously improved since, includes some innovative features:

Data is spread across multiple channels to protect against single-head element or media defects

Error detection/correction code (ECC) is applied at two levels. 

Level one- ECC rewrites the data to another location further down the original track.

Level two- ECC rewrites the data across multiple tracks and allows for data recovery in case there is a bad track.

Throughout, read-while-write verification is used to check the validity of each data set and is automatically rewritten if an error is detected.

As a result of this process, it would take 130 tape drives writing data continually for one year to encounter an error that could not be fixed by ECC. That means you are more likely to get hit by lighting, get killed by a shark or win a multi-million dollar lottery, than encounter an uncorrectable error in your enterprise tape environment.  Pretty good odds!

All of this sounds good, right?  Check back next month to learn about LTO in modern use at the ESG Lab.  These case studies will show you how tape technology is improving and expanding our data storage capabilities and why you should reconsider how you think about tape.

*Assumes 2.5:1 data compression

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