It has been a few weeks since I have written but the news from Sun storage keeps coming. In fact Sun now has a series of “Sun Knows Storage” videos that I believe you will find very interesting. In this first video you will receive insight by four individuals on some of the strategies being pursued and the importance of Sun’s storage leadership:

• Jonathan Schwartz, Sun CEO and President, talks about the importance of your data even during these times of economic turmoil and the importance of storage infrastructure.
• Fred Moore, President Horison Information Strategies, discusses best practices and data lifecycle.
• Dr. Jim Cates, Sun Senior Director Storage Development, provides some insight into the future of Sun storage.
• Jake Carroll, Senior Systems Programmer from the University of Queensland in Australia, talks about the importance of Sun storage at the University.

While you are at that site, you can also watch the other videos in this “Sun Knows Storage” series on tape drives, tape automation, and virtual tape, and also Sun’s commitment to storage support services. But no need to stop there. You will find this site has numerous videos that will be of interest to you on Sun storage.

Finally, for today :-), Sun takes storage seriously for all environments and you can watch and listen to Jonathan talk about this in another video entitled "Sun is Committed to Mainframe" storage.

You may or may not be surprised at the frequency that I am asked a question similar to the following: "Is Sun in the Mainframe storage business? I heard that Sun is only focused on OpenStorage."

Well contrary to what some other vendors want you to believe, Sun is definitely in the Mainframe storage business and has significantly enhanced those storage solutions since acquiring StorageTek (STK) back in 2005. In 2008 alone there were new tape drives (T9840D and T10000B – the first and only 1TB drive with a native FICON attachment option), a new automated tape library (SL3000), significant virtual tape enhancements (VSM), a new version of encryption (KMS 2.0), and new disk (ST9990V and ST9985V; DASD) models which included attachment options to mainframes. Also, Sun’s mainframe storage provides you with a native FICON attachment option. Not even the industry leading FICON vendor can make that claim – what is that all about? Sorry, I digress. Along with these new capabilities, the Sun mainframe storage software suite was also enhanced to accommodate the new and improved hardware. In fact, in 2008 Sun delivered the most prolific set of mainframe and open systems storage solutions in its history. And to be clear, all of Sun’s mainframe storage solutions can attach natively to the IBM System z10 server.

Definitely Sun is leading the industry in OpenStorage solutions and the Unified Storage 7000 family is by far the most exciting storage solution that has hit the industry in years. It is transforming the industry and is an example of what the innovative geniuses within Sun are developing. I was an employee of another IT vendor for over 20 years prior to joining Sun so I can state without hesitation that the Sun storage technology leads the industry in several categories including OpenStorage and, yes, mainframe tape solutions. That is one reason when looking back at the STK acquisition in 2005 I think it was a perfect fit for Sun. As STK led the industry with enterprise storage solutions then, Sun leads the industry in enterprise storage solutions today.

I invite you to have a meeting with the Sun Storage team and find out in more detail what Sun has been doing recently and what Sun is planning over the next few years.

In December 2008, Sun opened the Broomfield, Colorado, datacenter which is used for development, engineering, test, and even to showcase Sun’s storage. Also, Sun’s mainframe attached storage and IBM mainframes are a significant part of this datacenter. Associated with this datacenter is a Customer Solution Center where you can visit to learn what is happening in Sun Storage or even perform a storage proof-of-concept. This datacenter replaces the old Louisville one which was home for StorageTek.

With the Broomfield datacenter, Sun took on the challenge of building a better datacenter to realize the benefits of more efficient, scalable, and green compute resources, and to clearly demonstrate how Sun's hardware, software, storage, services, and best practices expertise can reduce operating costs, increase business agility, and minimize the IT footprint.

I just did the tour of the data center. In addition to the impressive datacenter itself, I was extremely amazed with the magnitude and success of the move. The new data center uses 66% less floorspace, decreasing from 496,000 sq. ft. to 126,000 sq. ft. Also, the amount of raised floor decreased from 165,000 sq. ft. to 700 sq. ft. for the IBM mainframes. You can even see the IBM mainframes that are installed.

If you want, you can download the Broomfield datacenter success story.

You can also read more information or receive a more complete “virtual” tour of the new Broomfield facility.

I think it is quite an impressive datacenter but you be the judge.

How often have you attempted to explain to your management the difference between enterprise and midrange tape drive technologies? You now have a white paper available, by IDC, that can help you explain those differences and that enterprise-class tape technologies are equipped with reliability features for today's data center.

Did you know that over 40% of enterprise tape solutions are used for business process workloads such as ERP, LOB, CRM, batch and OLTP?

Read this latest white paper, "The Market Opportunity for Enterprise Tape," which distinguishes the enterprise tape technology and why not all backup applications should be treated equally.

In case you missed these white papers supporting the value of tape, I wanted to bring them to your attention and provide you with information on how to locate them:

Tape The Digital Curator of the Information Age by Fred Moore – Tape won’t go away, but its role is expanding from a pure backup solution to that of a premier long-term storage technology.

Tape Technology Leaps Forward in The 3rd Era by Fred Moore – Contrary to some general perceptions, many improvements have occurred in the tape industry recently. This paper details 3rd Generation tape technology developments, including longer media life, significantly improved drive and library reliability, higher drive duty cycles and much faster data rates than any previous generation of tape technology.

Using Tape Virtualization to Improve Backup Performance by Taneja Group – Virtual tape technology is arguably the easiest way to introduce disk into a tape-based backup infrastructure, to improve backup performance and reliability. This paper considers current data management considerations and provides a quick review of Sun's tape virtualization solutions.

Blending Tape Virtualization and Data Deduplication To Optimize Data Protection Performance by Taneja Group – "Green" concerns are on the rise as data growth continues to spiral out of control, raising both environmental and budgetary challenges. Tape virtualization alone has very positive impacts on operational issues in data protection, but it also provides access to storage capacity optimization (SCO) technologies like compression, single instancing, and data de-duplication that can offer additional advantages in the right kinds of environments.

Combining Storage Capacity Optimization and Replication to Optimize Disaster Recovery Capabilities by Taneja Group – In this Solution Profile, Taneja takes a closer look at the combined use of VTL, replication, and SCO technologies to address DR requirements, discussing the pros and cons associated with the deployment of these technologies in tandem.

These and other white papers are available from the Sun White Paper Web Site.

Your CIO is likely under intense pressure to reduce TCO (CapEx and OpEx) while improving service levels, managing risks, supporting business growth, and enabling competitiveness. One of the initiatives around managing risks that your CIO may be focused on is business continuity.

If you use or maintain a Disaster Recover (DR) site as part of your business continuity plan, periodically you need to validate your ability to recover your business should a disaster occur. This validation process in many cases is a regulatory, insurance, or auditor requirement. Part of this is due to the confidential nature of the data your business manages, and your business may not survive if your data center is down and you are unable to recover all of the data. However, a DR site requires a substantial investment in people, money and time and you are likely looking for ways to minimize these three cost factors.

In enterprise environments, tape is typically one of the storage tiers used in the management of your data and needs to be included in your DR plans. I have written previously about the benefits of virtual tape in real tape environments but have not focused on it from a DR perspective. I have two basic questions for you on this topic:

Would it be of value to your business if:

• You could validate your real and virtual tape business continuance capability without the need to purchase duplicate hardware and software?
• You had the ability to support a DR test and keep your business running simultaneously without the risk of losing data?

I suspect your answer to both of these questions is “absolutely yes!”

In addition to being able to accomplish the above two feats, what if you had the ability to

• Logically divide your existing production real and virtual hardware and tape volume pools into a production and DR test environment? Allowing you to test your DR configuration while concurrently running production work?
• Keep your data at both your local and remote DR sites in synch during the DR test?
• Conduct your DR test using either local or remote resources, or a combination of local and remote resources?
• Discard all of the data created from the DR test and seamlessly redeploy the logically separated hardware back into your production environment?

I, again, suspect you would like to have these capabilities and more.

Sun has addressed these issues with its Concurrent Disaster Recovery Test option of the VSM virtual tape system. Concurrent Disaster Recovery Test is one of many VSM options on which you can base your disaster recovery plan. VSM provides you with a wide spectrum of DR options and more are on the horizon. If interested, you can get the latest information about VSM

Even in these difficult economic times you likely need to move and store data fast and reliably, manage business risk, optimize operations, enhance disaster recovery, and save data for longer periods of time. On top of this you need to manage your explosive data growth, which could be as much as 60% annually, while optimizing your storage resources. The end result needs to be a storage infrastructure that adapts as needed to meet your constantly evolving business needs and data management challenges.

Within your storage hierarchy, an integrated virtual tape library (IVTL, defined in my September 09, 2008 blog) can enable you to store the right data on the right device at the right price, while helping you protect your business-critical information based on its changing value. An IVTL can also enable faster backup and data recall which improves your Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO), resulting in more efficient use of hardware resources (i.e., disk, tape libraries and tape drives), increased productivity, an efficient and effective business resumption capability, and lower management costs. Further, an IVTL can help reduce complexity and simplify management by bringing true virtualization into your enterprise tape environment. Instead of writing directly to tape, you can use an IVTL for your appropriate tape applications to write and read at disk speeds to virtual tape drives created and maintained by the IVTL software (this speed is particularly critical for backing up hundreds, more likely thousands, of small data files). It can also economize and optimize tape drives and library resources resulting in fewer tape cartridges, tape drives and tape libraries which reduces space and energy costs in addition to the savings that you could realized by the movement of inactive disk data to more energy efficient tape. As Fred Moore, President of Horison, Inc., would say, “There should be zero energy cost for data that are not being used.” It is estimated that over 60% of your data is inactive and should reside on tape as opposed to disk.

With a properly designed IVTL environment, you could realize the following benefits:

• Manage massive data growth by dramatically increasing the amount of data typically stored on each cartridge utilizing 70 to 80% of your tape media instead of as little as 15% as seen in some environments
• Protect your investment by meeting ever-changing tape workloads without adding more libraries, drives, or media.
• Enhance data protection through physical migration and electronic vaulting.
• Maintain or improve service levels by retrieving data at the speed of disk—while also responding to peak demands.
• Simplify your tape management by moving your data according to your rules, which also helps streamline tape operations.
• Minimize poor cartridge utilization and complex backup/restore activities.
• Streamline tape operations and handle additional new business requirements with improved performance and accuracy.
• Deliver superior consolidation benefits saving space and power by up to 60%.
• Tap into enormous capacity within your existing tape media with fewer tape mounts, tape drives, and cartridges, saving time and improving reliability.

Learn how the Sun StorageTek VSM and VTL Plus systems can help you consolidate and build an IVTL environment. The Sun IVTL systems are designed to be a highly scalable, sharable, performance storage solution for your mission critical data. Further, they are designed, tested and proven to work with the Sun StorageTek SL8500 and SL3000 Modular Library Systems and the StorageTek T9840D, T10000B and LTO4 (open systems only) tape drives.

Wow! It is amazing what has been happening at Sun over the past year.

1. Upgraded and enhanced the entire storage portfolio
2. Ranked #1 in Tape automation storage market
3. Increased the number of enterprise libraries installed since the StorageTek acquisition by 2x
4. Installed 2x the number of midrange libraries since the SL3000 introduction in 2nd quarter 2008
5. 1/3 of the enterprise tape library are installed in new customers

I know I can not provide you with all the details in this limited space to support these claims but listen and watch Tom Wultich talk about these points and others.

It has been tremendously busy the last couple of month with several conferences. A few of these conferences include SC08 (Supercomputing), Storage Networking World, System z Expo, and Forum 2.0. The one that focused almost exclusively on Sun storage was Forum 2.0 that occurred in Menlo Park at the Sun Executive Business Center on November 12 and 13, 2008. The following keynote presentations should be of particular interest as they focus on Sun's storage strategy, execution, an executive panel, open strategy, a customer panel, and a special guest.

• Sun's Storage Strategy - John Fowler articulates Sun's ongoing commitment to storage and Sun's open innovation strategy.

• Sun's Storage Execution - Jon Benson and Victor Walker discuss Sun Storage Execution.

• Sun Executive Panel - Top executives from around Sun discuss storage technologies for open systems and mainframe environments.

• Sun's Open Strategy - Jonathan Schwartz, Sun Microsystems CEO, discusses Sun's Open Strategy.

• Customer Panel - Listen to a panel discussion from leaders in the storage industry.

• Special Guest - Fred Moore, Horison Information Strategies President, provides insight and analysis into the latest emerging trends and the key developments in the storage industry.

Sun is a full storage vendor as you can tell from the breath and depth of these presentations. If you are interested in additional information regarding Sun's Enterprise and Mainframe Storage you can access that content at this ThinkStorage site.

Last time in my “Did you hear ... ?” entry I wrote about how the tape industry has been revitalizing itself over the past few years and promised more information. The information I want to share with you today deals with how tape has entered a third era in its life that began back in 1952 – 56 years ago. But instead of just reading my words in this blog today, I refer you to the industry insight news section of the ThinkStorage site "And now you can know ..." that provides you with a summary and reference to a new white paper from Fred Moore, President of Horison,Inc.

This is an exciting time in the industry because of all the advances that have taken place along with the expectation of things to come. We at Sun understand this path well and have a great future planned. I look forward to sharing with you that future when the time is right.

A startling set of events happened over the past few years that seemed to be missed in the industry: The tape industry developed significantly more reliable solutions.

Did you know ... ?

• tape media has significantly improved in reliability, ruggedness, and media life (15 – 30 years)
• enterprise tape drives are almost 12 times more reliable compared to the 3480/4480 vintage
• tape libraries are delivering superior performance, concurrent and non-disruptive upgrades, and higher availability due to fault-tolerance designs
• integrated virtual tape libraries provide a step function reliability improvement for the physical tape subsystem and often increase media efficiency up to 80% or more of a cartridge
• the amount of data that can be stored on a single cartridge can easily contain the content of a single disk drive
• tape drives and tape media have a longer useful life than disk products
• tape has an advantage over disk – up to a 23:1 ratio in cost and 290:1 ratio in energy.

These facts along and many other accomplishments have occurred in the tape industry over the past few years. Is it any wonder why 68% of companies currently using only disk for long-term archiving plan to start using tape and 51% of companies currently using both disk and tape for long-term archiving plan to increase their tape usage?

Customer implementation of tape is increasing for a variety of reasons. Several of the facts are provided above and I will be sharing more with you soon. Spread the word!

Integrated Virtual Tape Libraries are virtual tape solutions that have integrated both tier 2 disk and tier 3 physical tape storage infrastructures together. VSM from Sun is the leading example of Integrated Virtual Tape Libraries in the mainframe space. This blog is more about Integrated Virtual Tape Libraries from an open systems perspective for enterprise customers. Sun is also leading the industry on this front but you may not be aware of its solution. Below is a short overview of how Sun is changing the open systems industry today with its open virtual tape solutions. You will be able to obtain more information about it from my Industry Insights perspective: “Open Tape: Virtualization and Beyond.”

Jonathan Schwartz,CEO and President – Sun Microsystems, mentioned back in March, 2008, “... fundamentally, Sun is about ... choice.” This is also true about our enterprise storage solutions that are available for open systems environments. The Sun open systems virtual tape solutions provide you a choice that will best support your business: Extreme backup performance (up to 2400 MB/sec) and significant data deduplication (realistic data reduction ratios of 20:1).

When you have petabytes of data to backup, you need the extreme performance to backup your data within your available time window. This is accomplished with the tier 2 storage structure of the Virtual Tape Library (VTL) solution. And further, you have the choice of backing up the tier 2 disk infrastructure to physical tape. As you know, you can not afford to have your backup data only on the disk infrastructure as it also needs to be on physical tape. The physical tape choices you have depends on the backup application you are using. For example if your backup application is NDMP 4.0-compliant (i.e., direct to tape and an application such as Symantec's Veritas NetBackup), it will keep track of your data in the virtual tape library infrastructure as it migrates from tier 2 disk to tier 3 physical tape.

Further, you have the choice of tape caching which allows the Sun VTL solution to manage the tier 2 disk to tier 3 physical tape migration independent of the backup application. Tape Caching provides policy-based triggers that can automatically export data to physical tapes immediately upon backup completion or based on criteria such as time of day, the number of days that data has been on virtual tape, or the amount of tier 2 disk space utilized. Tape Caching also provides flexible reclamation policies that delete data within the tier 2 disk that have been migrated to the tier 3 physical tape thus creating additional space on the tier 2 disk for additional backups.

Sun solutions give you a choice as Jonathan mentioned in March – a fundamental part of Sun for your advantage.

A term that is beginning to appear in the industry these day's is “Integrated Virtual Tape Library (Integrated VTL).” It, however, has not received much attention but it has been around for over 10 years. Sun's Integrated VTL is its VSM (Virtual Storage Manager) and it attaches to mainframe computers. I could write pages on the value and benefits of VSM but will just reference its web site here.

So what are the basic concepts of an Integrated VTL? An Integrated VTL is the integration of tier 2 and tier 3 storage solutions. I wrote about storage tiers in the August, 2008, News Alert. The Integrated VTL combines disk arrays (tier 2) as a front-end to an automated tape library (tier 3). The disk arrays serves as a cache or buffer for the most active data before the data are migrated to the larger-capacity and lower-cost tape library. The disk arrays appear to the operating system as multiple tape drives (virtual tape drives).

Further, the Integrated VTL can store multiple virtual tape volumes on a single physical tape cartridge, enabling utilization levels to reach 80 percent or more on a single cartridge. The effective utilization of a single cartridge is even more important these days as its capacity has increased up to 1 TB of uncompressed data with the T10000B drive technology. This “stacking” of virtual volumes on a physical cartridge is an effective way to maximize the amount of data stored on the media.

An Integrated VTL also gives you options to easily define the conditions when your data are automatically migrated to the tier 3 tape library. The data can be migrated based on conditions such as file size, the tier 2 buffer utilization, the number of days since last accessed, etc. – conditions that are important for your unique environment. And note that this migration is done without going through the server – so zero additional server capacity is used to move the data from the tier 2 buffers to the tier 3 library. The Integrated VTL provides you with the advantages of fast backup and recovery on tier 2 disk along with the less expensive and dark green tier 3 tape archiving.

So it seems like an Integrated VTL has all the advantages you would want in your environment as it combines the best of both the disk and tape environments. For more information, read “Tape: The Digital Curator of the Information Age.”

Sun understands the importance of your data and gives you choices for both the mainframe and open systems both now and into the future.

Do you ever get the impression that to most of the storage industry the answer to all of your storage questions is “Disk!”

Two of the buzzes at SHARE during the week of August 11, 2008, were “green” from the mainframe perspective and “no more mainframe tape” from some of the disk storage vendors. These two themes seem to be in conflict with each other to me. I understand from a mainframe perspective the green theme as I was with IBM in 2003 when the mainframe group began touting the green theme of consolidation as a result of all the rolling blackouts in the State of California.

But I don't understand how the green theme and “no more mainframe tape” support one another. But let me think through this concept and I will look at it through the lens of storage tiers.

When your data are first created, it logically belong on primary storage – primary disk. I believe we all are in agreement on this point. When the data has not been referenced in over 30 days, migrate it to less expensive, and likely less reliable, disk. This is where I will start to diverge with the “disk is the answer all storage questions” philosophy. But I will not digress on this point.

When your data has not been referenced in over 90 days, migrate it again to another disk technology – maybe MAID (Massive Array of Idle Disk) – and keep it there forever and to be on the safe side, replicate each disk storage tier on more disk.

Longevity

Another point you need to be aware in all of this is that disk will likely be replaced every 3 to 5 years. So now there is a data migration effort required on your part for each disk storage tier every 3 to 5 years (compared to 10+ years on tape). And what do you get out of this data migration? The latest and greatest disk technology for each disk storage tier, a huge bill for all that new disk, maybe a services bill for the help you need to migrate your data, and time and energy from your limited personnel pool.

Energy Savings

Okay, so you think this may work because the disk-only vendors are touting that the total cost of ownership over 5 years for disk and tape are converging. Well that is not happening based on the Clipper Notes report that I referenced in my August 11, 2008 blog where the 5 year TCO for disk is about 23x that of tape and the energy cost for disk is about 290x that of tape.

You may say that study is flawed but do you think the spinning disk will cost less from an energy perspective than tape? I do not believe any of us will believe that point but MAID technology should fill that gap. Right? Well the energy requirements of MAID from the studies I have seen are still significantly higher than that of tape, almost 17x.

So why won't MAID save you that much energy? Likely because data is striped across multiple disks as a result of RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disk) technology. Oh! That means that the striped data on the MAID devices will have to wake up all the disk that the file is striped across – not just one. So MAID needs to access more than just one disk – no big deal right?

Availability

From my mainframe days, I was informed by engineers that electrical components are more likely to fail during a power up than when they are in constant use. So to me that means the risk is greater on MAID technology as it is powered up and down often.

Restore

Now, what if you need a large file for a regulatory compliance request but that data and that disk has not be accessed for over three years. In the example above, you will retrieved your data from the MAID disk. The disks across which this file has been stripped begin to power up. You are fortunate this time as all of the disk power up without a failure. Now what about the data integrity? You are again fortunate this time as all of your data is retrieved without any double or triple bit errors. You finally get your data on primary storage because it will need to be researched for the required information for a few weeks. After your research is complete and you have satisfied your compliance request the data begins its journey down disk pool lane again.

So bringing this together, I do not see “no mainframe tape” as a green alternative. In fact, I see it as quite the opposite. So what is my solution? Use the storage tier infrastructure that has worked well in mainframe environment for decades and is becoming more prevalent in open environments. Also, be sure your data is on the appropriate tier for the appropriate amount of time for your business. What you will receive is a smaller storage bill, greater reliability from your storage tiers, and significantly lower energy bills – becoming more green!

You can read more about the benefits of storage tiers and going green in my news alert “How Much is Your Green?”

During the first day of joining Sun, I was given a book to read (Storage Spectrum) so I could become more fully aware of the board spectrum of storage solutions and technologies in the industry. This book has it all for storage. Last week I attended a conference and listened to Fred Moore, President of Horison,Inc., the author of this book, and one of the industry's leading storage experts. As I listened to his topic “Tape – The Digital Curator of the Information Age,” he reminded us of the inherent advantages that tape has in the industry over disk beyond the cost advantage (Clipper Group stated that disk is about 23X more expensive than tape as recently as February, 2008). I left the presentation with a re-enforced vision and enthusiasm that there is an excellent future for tape, which I have known for decades.

In Fred's presentation he also reminded us that his topic refers to critical and invaluable content that are 1) fixed, 2) needs to be preserved for archive and compliance reasons for decades, and 3) should be stored on a green technology to avoid huge power and cooling costs because this data is infrequently accessed.

So why am I optimistic about the future for tape? Because the Digital Curator needs to be able to perform the following functions:

• Store this invaluable content for decades. Tape can easily meet this requirement based on the current reliability of the technology and media, warranted up to 30 years. What about disk? Maybe up to 6 years. Conclusion, tape is the long life media.
• Provide portability of this invaluable content. This is another significant attribute of tape but not so for disk. Can you easily move disk hard drives? No. But what happens to the data if you lose power? With tape you can readily move your content remotely without electricity. Not so easily accomplished, if at all, with disk. Conclusion, tape media is portable and can be moved without electricity.
• Store this inactive content so it does not consume electricity. That is another easy accomplishment when your data is on tape but not so easily accomplished, if at all, when your data is on disk. Conclusion, tape is green. According to the same Clipper Notes referenced above, disk consumes about 290X more energy than tape.
• Store this content securely. Encryption is readily available for your tape data but not so for disk data. Conclusion, tape media can easily be secure.

Tape is superior to disk for all of these requirements. So what does this all mean? Tape is the logical choice for Digital Curator.