Sun Eco-Friendly Enterprise Storage Solutions

October '08 News Alert

And now you can know ....

Within the past week another white paper has become available to help all of us understand what has been happening in the tape industry in the past few years. This white paper was written by Fred Moore, President of Horison, Inc., a leading storage expert and consultant in the industry. The following is a summary of some of the points Mr. Moore raises.

The magnetic tape industry is in its third era since the first successful tape drive appeared in 1952. The growth opportunity that lies ahead for tape storage solutions is increasing and is being fueled by the following:

• Cartridge tape capacities will continue on an unprecedented growth pace.
• Integrated virtual tape systems will proliferate in the mainframe, non-mainframe, and midrange markets.
• Tape WORM and encryption will address data protection for the compliance and archival markets.
• The average price per gigabyte for automated tape library storage is expected to remain below that of disk storage.
• The operating expense for automated tape systems should remain significantly below that of online storage as people, facilities and energy costs rise.
• The promise that network bandwidth would be sufficient to replace physical transport for moving large amounts of data has yet to materialize due to the exponential growth of the data.
• Tape has a much longer storage life than disk, eliminating the need to move data to new media as frequently during its lifetime.

The economics of tape for many applications are compelling from an acquisition cost and more importantly a cost of ownership perspective.

If you wish to learn more about what has been happening and a glimpse into the future, you can now obtain and read the entire white paper.

Tape is here to stay so leap forward with your understanding and knowledge of the tape industry and know that Sun/StorageTek has been and will continue to be the innovation leader. You can also read about Sun's depth and breath of its current tape portfolio.

September '08 News Alert

Open Tape: Virtualization and Beyond

In my September 22, 2008 blog entry I wrote about how you have choices from Sun that can provide you with open systems virtual tape library solutions to meet your data backup requirements. There are primary decisions you need to make as you choose the virtual tape library solution that is best for your business. I just read an insightful white paper, Using Tape Virtualization to Improve Backup Performance, that helps us understand the different types of virtual tape solutions available for open system environments. The Taneja Group wrote this white paper and it gives you a basic understanding of the issues you need to consider to backup your data. It leaves us with the following quote:

"Sun's range of tape virtualization solutions give their customers the tools to manage these issues, optimizing their environment to meet their customers paramount concerns in the most cost-effective manner."

Tools to manage your backup issues and solutions to cost effectively optimize your environment to meet your needs. Sun is providing you want you need. Truly Open Tape: Virtualization and Beyond.

August '08 News Alert

How Much is Your Green?

There is a tremendous buzz in the IT industry about green. Most vendors have their green suits on telling us how green they are from both a company and product/solution perspective. Sun is no different in that respect but our enterprise storage looks at green slightly differently than other storage vendors: Understand the problem and how to best solve those problems from a holistic perspective.

What are some of the energy problem in the industry today? First, studies are telling us that you are running out of space, power and cooling (41% of Fortune 500 IT execs cite power/cooling as a major problem). Second, the cost of energy is increasing as a percent of your IT costs and is increasingly hitting your bottom line. Third, increasingly we hear you are looking at the environmental impact of your electrical use and are taking action to reduce your global impact and environmental footprint as stakeholders use it as a metric to do business. Fourth, your datacenters are building-out as your data growth continues to explode and are contributing to the energy shortage. I've been told that some of your companies simply can't even draw enough power for your datacenter needs!

Sun is one of the most eco-friendly companies with their enterprise storage products in the computer industry. We do not attempt to solve your problems with one answer - one solution. How have we done it? First by leveraging each of the storage tiers - taking advantage of primary and secondary storage and long term retention, and second by refreshing the older technologies with new technology.

Each storage tier has its advantage for data but each one has its time and place in the overall storage hierarchy. Tier one: Primary storage - usually data that have been referenced within the past 30 days and when you need it you need it absolutely, positively NOW! Tier one is typically on primary disk and also the least energy efficient. Tier two: Secondary storage - usually data that you have not referenced for 30 to 90 days but when you need it, you typically want it within a few seconds. Tier two is the logical time to utilize SATA disk or integrated virtual tape libraries. Tier three: Long-term retention - usually your day that you haven't referenced for over 90 days but when you need it, your typically want it within a few minutes. Tier three is the logical time to have your data in a tape library.

Focusing on tiers two and three, Sun allows you to do more with less (less power & cooling and space) compared to the older technologies. The following is a quick review of our enterprise libraries, drives and integrated virtual tape solutions.

The SL8500 library is up to 40% more power efficient than the old 9310 library based on the same number of drives in each library. That 40% savings could be even greater if you consolidate two or more old 9310 libraries with one SL8500. Energy savings and a smaller foot print. The new SL3000 library can grow with no increase in its energy requirements since they are in the Base and Drive Expansion Module units only. So as you grow up to its 3000+ slot capacity via the Cartridge Expansion Modules, it's energy free. Green scalability to the max.

The newest Sun T9840D (fast access) and T10000B (large capacity) tape drive technologies - allow you to reuse your existing T9840 and T10000 media - no need to recycle your older media as the T9840D drive can read and write on T9840 media that was bought back in 1998 and the T10000B drive can read and write on the previous T10000 media. A T10000 cartridge can store up to 1 TB of native data (2X the first T10000) on a single cartridge using the T10000B drives. A T9840 cartridge can store almost 4x the capacity on the same media using the T9840D drive compared to the T9840A drive. This is taking eco to the max!

The integrated virtual tape library solution is comprised by Sun's Virtual Storage Manager (VSM). It is a highly sophisticated hybrid disk/tape subsystem that emulates a tape automation system and allows for efficient stacking of files on tape to use essentially the entire tape and is based on policy management - removing the human interaction to move data between the different storage tiers. It allows for potentially less media (less cost), fewer cartridge slots (less floor space), and fewer drives (less demand for real tape drive).

When it is all integrated, you can use the policy management capabilities to optimize and automate data placement on the storage tier that makes the most economical and ecology sense for your business. As your data grows (explodes) and ages, make decisions that are best for your business, become more green and spend less green.

July '08 News Alert

Tape - Alive and Well

Fred Moore, President of Horison, Inc., wrote in his white paper "Tape - The Digital Curator of the Information Age" tape is expanding its role from a pure backup solution to that of a premier long-term storage technology. What does this really mean? I will look at the various ways tape is being used and how it is expanding its role in the overall tiered storage infrastructure.

What are the typical uses for tape?

• Disaster Recovery - Maintaining static copy of data off site for DR
• Data Protection - Secure and lasting storage of sensitive data
• Archive - Long-term storage and retrieval of data

Disaster recovery best practices dictate that a copy of the data be stored at an off-site location. The value of tape in disaster recovery situations include - ortability of your data; all of your data in a single, static backup copy; data that can be protected by encryption; high speed restore streams; meet audit and regulatory requirements; and the lowest cost per stored GB. Also, data on tape is less sensitive to external electronic attack such as viruses, disk crashes, file deletion and operator errors.

Data protection of enterprise data requires secure and lasting storage of sensitive data. Tape is the most economical way to preserve data for the long-term and is one of the least sensitive storage tiers to external electronic attacks.

Archiving your data for decades is, or is becoming, required. Archived data does not and should not be on the more expensive primary or secondary disk. The value of tape in unsurpassed for archival data as it can provide data immutability and media shelf life surpasses most required archive time frames.

During the past ten years significant tape reliability improvements have occurred including servo tracking that maintains media and head alignment to ensure accurate reads and writes, read-after-write verification to check that the data were written correctly to the tape, and microcode error correction that minimizes restore failures.

Tape is not the answer to all storage questions but it definitely has a critical place in the overall tiered storage infrastructure. It is one of, if not, the most economically responsibility storage tiers - the lowest cost per GB, low power and cooling costs during operation and no energy consumed and zero heat generated when at rest.

The optimal storage environment is a mixture of disk and tape. Tape is a safety net for disaster recovery and data protection. It is a low-cost, long-term storage medium for archived data. And it allows for easy scaling to accommodate the data explosion that is occurring in the industry and likely within your business.

What is the price of having your data on tape? Low - compared to other storage technologies. What is the cost of not having your data at tape? Could be priceless.

June '08 News Alert

Behind the Scenes: True Tape Innovation

The Sun StorageTek T9840D tape drive is the latest example of true innovation at Sun. Get the "behind the scenes" story on its development below.

In developing this drive, Sun was challenged with creating backward compatibility to media that was written on early generation T9840 drives – going all the way back to 1998. Sun was able to accomplish this through their knowledge and understanding of tape head technologies that have made them a leader in the market.

The innovation behind the T9840D includes a new recording channel that gives the ability to read legacy T9840A, B, and C written media. Furthermore, Sun placed an additional reader head in the drives in close proximity to the T9840D write heads to provide high signal-to-noise ratio – as well as low sensitivity to dropouts. On top of this, Sun doubled the number of tracks that can be read and written to with existing media – now that is innovation!

What this means is that data written on the T9840 media by older generation drives can be read by the new T9840D drives. Plus, that very same media can be written onto by the new T9840D drives in the new format. This type of innovation allows you to re-use your media going back an unprecedented four generations (protecting your legacy data), save time (no migrating of your data), and cut your media costs (reuse existing media instead of purchasing more) – unique in the industry!

So far, feedback has been extremely positive. During early support testing of the T9840D drives, one of Sun's customers stated how it was one of the most successful testing programs they had been involved in. The performance, capacity, and backward readability of media written by earlier generations of T9840 drives had been delivered – as promised. In fact, the customer did not find one test situation that broke the firmware or code.

This is just one example of how Sun's innovation has been leveraged into the mainframe storage market and to protect your critical investment – your data.