Around the Storage Block Blog : tape

I've been personally impacted by lost tapes

jim hankins — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 17:55:00 GMT

Hi Folks,

Yesterday I received a letter in the mail at home that started off:

Dear Sir or Madam,

We are writing to let you know that computer tapes containing some of your personal information were lost while being transported to an off-site storage facility by our archive services vendor. While we have no reason to believe that this information has been accessed or used inappropriately, we deeply regret that this incident occurred....

So the first question I have is how does an archive vendor lose tapes? How hard can it be to take the tapes from your customer put them in a secure truck and drive them to the storage facility? Isn't that your whole business model - you will pick up, transport and store these tapes safely and securely 100% of the time?

Now I understand that any activity with humans involved cannot be guaranteed to work 100% of the time. So what really happened? A bit more of an explanation would have been helpful, such as the truck was in an inadvertent accident and the contents of the truck were spilled into a river or all over the highway and could not all be recovered. Without more details I'm left wondering did someone make off with the tapes by accident or on purpose? Or was this just sloppy work by the company?

Anyway, I hope this is a call to action for this company to do at least two things to prevent such an incident in the future.

1. Look into tape encryption such as the LTO-4 offers. I would have been more much pleased if that second sentence read "While the tapes were physically lost, the data they contained cannot be accessed or read by anyone because the data on the tapes is securely encrypted with sophisticated technology requiring encryption keys to make the data readable. Our security policy ensures that these keys are always stored in or transported to physically separate locations from the computer tapes."

2. Consider the use of replication and electronic vaulting for moving data off-site for archiving. With new technologies such as deduplication and low-bandwidth replication, this company would perhaps be able to reduce the amount of data that is stored on tapes and physically transported to archive storage. Again, I don't know the specifics here, but as an example let's say this company had four sites that they were backing up to data to tape and transporting those tapes to off-site archives. With replication and electronic vaulting, they could replicate data from three of their sites to just one site for backup to tapes and then only have to move tapes from the one site to archive storage thereby reducing their risk exposure by 75%.

If you're worried about how a similar incident could impact your company and what risks are involved HP is here to help. We can work with you to significantly reduce your data security exposure from the desktop to your data center. On the storage side, we offer a FREE storage security risk assessment. For more details on HP's other data security options beyond storage please check HP's Security web page.

Tape is Dead! - And here's the timetable

jim hankins — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 22:02:00 GMT

When there are no more natural disasters!

When electricity is free!

When hardware never fails!

When software is bug-free!

When people no longer make mistakes!

When there are no computer viruses or other malicious code!

When all people are honest!

When government regulations (SarbOx, SEC, HIPPA. etc.) have gone away!

And even though disk-based backup is set to revolutionize the retention of short-term backups and recovery, don't forget that in that last item some records will need to be stored for many, many years. In the case of HIPPA think about keeping a patient's records over a lifetime which could be 70 to 80 years or beyond. So for some businesses disk, tape and other longer term achival mediums are going to be a mandatory part of the data life cycle architecture.

I'm going on vacation for a few weeks so no posting for a while. I hope you've been having a great summer.

Talk to you in September,

Jim Hankins

The Real Story on tape storage

jim hankins — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 14:26:00 GMT

The Real Story on tape storage

Do SMBs Really Need Tape? Good Question!

jasontreu — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 13:27:00 GMT

By Bob Conway. I recently saw an article in InformationWeek after the our recent DAT announcement. I wanted to share my thoughts on the subject.

DAT/DDS The Tape Format That Will Not Die

Posted by Howard Marks, Jul 23, 2008 11:07 PM
http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2008/07/datdds_the_tape.html
After an absence of five or six years, and two generations, DDS trademark owner Sony (NYSE: SNE) is rejoining HP (NYSE: HPQ) in supporting the seventh generation of DDS/DAT drives, DAT320, targeted at the SMB market. DAT320, like HP's DAT160s abandons the Digital Auto Tape cartridge, and its 4mm wide tape, using 8mm tape in a two reel cartridge instead. My biggest problem with DAT320 is that I don't think the SMB customer with one server should be backing up to tape. I've seen too many SMBs fail at making a good backup every day, and getting one offsite occasionally, with a tape drive. They don't change tapes, don't notice with the backup program fails, don't take tapes offsite and, since they're not IT professionals, generally don't understand how backups work and don't care to know till something goes wrong. A combination of a local backup to a USB hard drive and an online backup makes more sense to me for these folks.

The real question to me is do we need a tape format specifically for low end use. Even if you disagree with me and think SMBs can handle tapes effectively why have tape formats specifically for the low end. Why can't SMBs use earlier generations of LTO? I just opened the CDW site to see what the street prices for SMB backup devices really are and right there on the front page are an HP DAT160 drive for $849 and a Tandberg LTO-2 drive for $760. Paying more for a drive that has less capacity (200 native GB/tape vs. 80 for DAT160) and no automation upgrade doesn't make any sense to me. Unlike DAT160 drives which can mount and read DDS-4 tapes the new DAT320 drives are only backwards compatible with DAT160 so there aren't many organizations that will get any real benefit from backwards compatibility.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Howard offers some interesting views, and no doubt they do reflect real life experiences for some people. We at HP have a different take on this issue. Also, while I can empathize with the comments on people not changing tapes, not noticing when the backups do occasionally fail etc., we should not conclude that the technology solution is at fault when it is generally poor operating processes or practices which are actually to blame. After all, automobiles crash every day because of poor drivers, that doesn't necessarily make the motor car a poor solution?

We feel we need to continue to offer choice to our customers so that they can work in a way that feels right for them and that mitigates their risk at an acceptable cost. Online backup may be viable for some people, but if the data set is big the bandwidth needed can be prohibitive, or the local infrastructure may not always be reliable enough to depend upon for the time it takes to complete the data transfer. And yes, a USB hard drive can be used in many environments to meet the basic needs of data protection. That is why HP supports the use of both these methodologies within our product lines. We also offer RDX based removable hard drives as another cost effective backup and disaster recovery solution for people who want even lower cost, but can manage with fewer pieces of removable media in their rotation scheme.

So, why continue with the DAT product line which is targeted directly at SMB customers? Our DAT 160 drive has been shipping successfully for just over a year now and in the first twelve months of shipment we have sold an average of 6 data cartridges on each drive. This suggests that thousands of customers continue to see a need for removable backup using multiple copies or versions of their data in a structured media rotation scheme at a relatively low cost.

We also need to respect the investment protection imperative of the many current DDS/DAT users who are still out there in the installed base. After all, since the first DDS drives were shipped in 1989 over 18-million DDS/DAT drives and over 400-million cartridges have been shipped. Of the total number of drives shipped 7.4-million have been sold since the year 2000, and that supports the notion that there is still a very healthy body of very satisfied DDS/DAT users, who like what the core technology offers. And while DAT 320 may be seen by some to offer somewhat limited backwards compatibility, it is still one generation more than switching to any different technology presents.

These are the major factors compelling us to continue to support this very successful tape format for SMBs.

DAT 320 for SMB Data Protection Part 2

CalvinZ — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 03:55:00 GMT

By Bob Conway

This is two-part of a two-part post. Part one discussed HP/Sony working together on the DAT 320. Today, I'll discuss why the DAT has become the choice for SMBs and also additional information on DAT 320.

So, what makes DAT such a firm favorite for tape based data protection? The Digital Data Storage format for DAT drives was first developed in collaboration between HP and Sony to turn a digital audio recording format (DAT) into a robust and reliable digital data storage format - DDS. Using helical scan technology HP, Sony, Seagate (now part of Quantum via Certance), and other DAT manufacturers were able to respond to small and medium size customer requirements for high capacity, high performance yet affordable data protection. Within a few short years, DAT was out shipping the established quarter-inch and half-inch tape drives of that era and had won the battle against other helical scan technologies such as Exabyte's 8mm technology.

There are a number of reasons why DAT was, and still is, the most popular tape technology for SMBs. Having witnessed some of the issues caused by the proprietary nature of some tape technologies, HP and Sony were committed from the outset to create the first open standard tape format for drive and media manufacturers. Soon after its launch in 1989 there were 13 members of the DDS/DAT Manufacturer Group committed to the development of DAT drives and media. As a result of the open standard for DAT drives and media, customers were freed from being locked-in to the fortunes, pace and direction of single-vendor proprietary tape technologies. DAT customers have always benefited from; wide availability, ease of data interchange, a robust future roadmap and greater competition between the manufacturers leading to lower prices and faster development cycles.

With compressed backup speeds of up to 86 gigabytes (GB) per hour, the DAT 320 will offer up to 320 GB of compressed capacity on a single cartridge - twice the capacity and nearly double the performance of the most current DAT 160 format. It is planned that DAT 320 drives will also consume fewer watts per GB than previous generations. DAT 320 will also read and write to DAT 160 cartridges providing an important level of backwards compatibility and investment protection to existing DAT users. The media cartridge will be the same size and footprint as today's DAT 160 cartridges. DAT 320 tape drives will be made available with a choice of both USB 2.0 and SAS native interfaces in a range of models, including internal units to fit into servers and workstations, rack-mount kits and stand alone units.

Bob Conway, Manager, Removable Media Devices Future Product Marketing

HP StorageWorks

DAT 320 a Major Step for SMB Data Protection

CalvinZ — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 03:46:00 GMT

By Bob Conway

This will be a two-part post. Part one will discuss HP/Sony working together on the DAT 320. Part two will discuss why the DAT has become the choice for SMBs and also additional information on DAT 320.

Part I

Yesterday, HP and Sony announced a joint development agreement to create the seventh generation of DDS/DAT tape technology. The release also talked about our intention to work together on the development of DAT 320 tape drives and media for release in the first half of 2009. This agreement will help HP and Sony to continue to provide small to midsize customers with access to a continuing technology roadmap for cost-effective data protection, disaster recovery and long term storage of data.

DAT 320 will be ideally suited for small and medium businesses, and enterprises with remote offices, that are in need of a reliable, high capacity data protection solution with a low overall cost of ownership and which need offsite storage of physical media. Customers who are outgrowing their existing tape drives will have the opportunity to upgrade to twice the capacity and almost twice the performance of other DDS/DAT tape drives on the market, while still being able to read and write to DAT 160 tapes. DAT 320 will allow continuing low-cost protection against system failures, operator error, theft, natural disasters and more.

This Joint Development Agreement brings two important tape technology developers back together for the benefit of both end-user and OEM customers.

Both HP and Sony were involved with the first four generations of DDS/DAT (DDS-1 through DDS-4) and DAT 320 sees them coming back together to pool the experience, technological advances and intellectual property each has made in the intervening years. By working together and combining their talents, both HP and Sony believe that they can each better serve the needs of end users and OEMs.

Importantly, this collaborative development supports the basic tenets of DDS/DAT is an open standard and 3rd party companies will still be able to obtain licenses through the DAT Manufacturer's Group (see http://www.datmgm.com/) . In effect, DDS/DAT will continue to be an open industry standard and the technology alliance will continue to make licenses available to both media and drive vendors should they wish to be involved.

Based on the fundamental benefits of open standards DDS/DAT is arguably the most successful tape technology ever released. 2009 sees the twentieth anniversary of the first DAT drives. Since then over eighteen million drives have been shipped by the various manufacturers who have participated in the industry. Now the seventh generation of this outstanding technology is under development at 160x the capacity and 50x the speed of the original DDS-1 drives.

Bob Conway, Manager, Removable Media Devices Future Product Marketing

HP StorageWorks

The Power of Open Standard Tape Technologies

CalvinZ — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 16:57:00 GMT

by Bob Conway

Today, I wanted to discuss the success of open standards in tape, benefits of open standards, and discuss DDS/DAT and LTO open standards.

Quarter-on-quarter shipments confirm the rise of open standard LTO Ultrium tape technology and the subsequent demise of other proprietary tape technologies.

Inspired with the success of DDS/DAT, the LTO Ultrium technology underlines the importance of an open industry standard tape format in achieving true market acceptance.

Magnetic tape of one form or another has been used for computer backup and archive applications for over fifty years, with the first tape drive launched in 1951 (a half-inch tape drive called the Uniservo we believe). Since then, massive technology advances have been made in tape formulation, data density, error handling and reliability, interfaces, and form factor. Today's industry leading tape drives from the LTO Ultrium technology family deliver compressed data capacities up to 1.6 TBs, speeds of 240 MB/second and state-of-the-art reliability and security.

Following the launch of the first tape drive, well over 30 different families of tape technology have been introduced, from 9-track to QIC, VXA to SAIT. Of these technologies only two have been open industry standard formats: DDS/DAT and LTO Ultrium. Both technologies have dominated the tape market and remain as the highest shipping tape technologies in 2008.

What's So Great About an Open Standard?

HP has made a conscious decision to invest in two open industry standard tape formats; DDS/DAT and LTO Ultrium. Both technologies have been highly successful. But just what part did the open standard play in this success?

An open standard is a documented description of technology that is publicly available. It allows anyone with the necessary technical know-how and resources to develop and build products based on the standard. Hardware and software products complying with the standard should be compatible with each other regardless of the manufacturer.

Open industry standards promote a number of benefits for customers. These include:

Investment protection - customers are unlikely to be at the mercy of a single manufacturer's fortunes, there is a robust future roadmap and assured compatibility.
Wide availability and assurance of supply - an open standard leads to multiple suppliers of both drives and media covering a broader range of channels and geographies.
Backward compatibility and interchange – standards bodies ensure that each manufacturer's drive is able to interchange data with other manufacturer's drives. Additionally, they ensure that backward compatibility is maintained to provide an easy upgrade path protecting previous investment.
Wider choice of complementary products and services - as independent hardware and software vendors seek to make their products compatible with the standard.
Faster development times - increased competition means that manufacturers battle to be "first to market" with new drives and new features.
Lower prices - economies of scale from multiple manufactures mean that the cost of specific parts of the drive and media are gradually decreased. In addition, increased competition leads to ongoing price reductions.

The First Industry Standard Tape Format - DDS/DAT

The DDS format for DAT drives was originally developed in partnership between HP and Sony. Having witnessed some of the issues caused by proprietary technologies, the partnership was committed to making DDS/DAT an open standard tape format for drive and media manufacturers. Soon after its launch in 1989 there were 13 members of the DDS/DAT Manufacturer Group committed to the development of DAT drives and media.

Despite the benefits of an open standard tape format described previously, the DAT technology would not have succeeded without the fact that it also delivers high reliability, appropriate levels of capacity and performance, ease of use and affordability.

Today, having shipped nearly 19 million drives and 280 million pieces of media, DAT technology is the most popular tape drive technology ever. DAT still dominates the low end of the tape drive market with an 82% market share in 2007, according to IDC.

LTO Ultrium Follows Suit

Inspired by the success of DAT, the path of an open standard was chosen for the development of LTO Ultrium and so, in 1997, the LTO Program was formed. Today three companies -- HP, IBM and Quantum -- jointly oversee the development and roadmap of Linear Tape-Open (LTO) technology providing open format specifications to simplify the complex array of tape storage options and to enable users to have multiple sources of compatible product and media. In addition to the benefits that the LTO Ultrium open standard format brings to customers, the technology also offers performance and affordability to match the needs of the midrange customer better than any other technology available today.

As a result LTO Ultrium is not just an open standard, but the defacto standard in the mid-range tape drive market with 95.2% market-share in calendar 2007. This also equates to a staggering 46% of total worldwide tape drive shipments in calendar 2007.

Bob Conway, Manager, Removable Media Devices Future Product Marketing

HP StorageWorks

Green Storage #4 – Your power saving strategy should include tape

DGarrels — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 03:08:00 GMT

- by David Garrels

We’ve talked in this blog before about how much power spinning disks use as being the biggest driver of storage power consumption. And we’ve discussed ways to minimize the number of spinning disks. Now, let’s talk about how much power you can save if you get the data off of disk and on to tape.

Everyone wants to keep every bit of information they create “in case they need it later”.    But with archive restrictions and requirements, and with the cost of electricity to keep multiple copies of data spinning on disk drives, there is a real opportunity to archive data off the primary array storage.

There are two primary options of where to archive data: disk (Virtual Tape Libs or Disk2Disk backup) or tape. There are trade-offs around time to recovery – it’s obviously quicker to pull data off disk. And there is a real opportunity for power savings if you archive to tape. In fact, the Clipper Group has compared tape and disk archiving and says tape archives have lifetime ownerships 23 times less and a near 290X energy advantage over archiving to disk.

Of course it’s a trade-off of access time and power savings, so you need to evaluate both. But anyone looking at a power saving project, should make sure to look at tape as an important and tangible way to reduce the power needed to store data.

The Clipper Group paper, “Disk and Tape Square Off Again – Tape Remains King of the Hill with LTO-4,” is available for download from http://www.ultrium.com/whitepapers. A companion webcast, hosted by Reine and Kahn, is available for archived viewing at www.ultrium.com. Take a look at it as part of your Green Storage project.

“Do something with the tapes!” says Joe Tucci

BlogArchive — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 13:27:00 GMT

-by Warren Smith

There is a hilarious new video on YouTube. Strangely, the video was produced by the EMC Corporation to suggest that Joe Tucci ordered employees there to get rid of tape, because the company is backing up to disk (one hopes not exclusively). Titled: “Bob and Joe: Fun with Tape” the premise of the video is however out of sync with Mark Lewis, EMC’s President Content Management and Archiving Division.

While the Tucci-obedient EMC employees in this video immediately begin to cut their tape into streamers and tie them to fans and jump and dance in front of the undulating tape snips, Mark Lewis has not yet amended his posted blog prediction dated August 5, 2007 that, “Here are my top 5 inflection points for storage technology in the next 3-5 years.

1. Offline Storage (Tape) becomes extinct for most uses…”

So who is right on the timing for “Tape is dead” reprisal, #12,435?

Joe – Now

Mark – in 3-5 years from August 2007 (making that 2010 – 2012)

Survey says: Neither of these can touch Nostradamus.

No doubt, either of these executives would love for you to believe that there is no use left for tape, except to create tacky air mobiles. But the reality of the marketplace shows proof positive that people still trust tape for the backups and archiving of much of their data. Fred Moore, well regarded storage analyst and President of Horison Information Strategies wrote in his February 2008 industry perspective “The tape market (Libraries, media and drives) is still a ~$4.2B industry in 2008. Tape cartridge capacity exceeds the capacity of hard disk drives and the gap will continue to widen as long as there is sufficient interest and commitment from remaining tape vendors.” Perhaps there is the thinking behind EMC’s new YouTube marketing: Convince tape storage vendors to give up on a $4.2B tape storage industry and EMC will enjoy migrating all of your data from tape to disk.

Well, HP StorageWorks is not buying into that one, Joe and Mark. Further, we at HP agree with the many people like Fred Moore, who see continuing value in tape storage, in increasingly diverse applications. Although tape’s traditional role as a backup medium has admittedly eroded from its earlier dominance, tape storage technology remains vital for archiving large amounts of less critical information that can be stored safely in case of future need. With email, and now even instant messaging, falling within the domain of compliance legislation, the rate of digital data growth is accelerating faster than ever – and with it demand for tape. As storage capacity continues its relentless growth, customers nearly everywhere are challenged to come up with the funding for the storage infrastructure to maintain this data. Even the wealthiest companies will struggle to justify the cost of preserving their entire content store on expensive disk arrays, even with lower cost disk drives.

At the end of the day, it’s pointless to split tape and disk into separate advocacy groups. HP StorageWorks holds that indeed, it is precisely the differences between tape and disk storage that makes them so effective in partnership. And so, is it just us or does EMC going on and on about the perfection of disk for this purpose and of disk for that purpose remind you of the person that only had a hammer and saw the entire world resembling a nail?

Sorry to hear about the EMC employees wasting their productive time on this video. Tape is not yet dead (footnoted source: Mark Lewis “I said ‘in the next 3-5 years’ “). More data today resides on tape than on disk. And this reality is likely to remain this way for longer than 3-5 years. But thanks EMC, for the video. And did everyone get Tucci’s memo? “Do something with the tapes!”. Thanks Joe! We certainly are.