This week Sun Microsystems sponsored, for the eighth time since acquiring StorageTek in the Fall of 2005, the Large Tape Users Group (LTUG). Twice every year LTUG meets to directly influence Sun’s open systems and mainframe tape products, roadmaps, and directions. The LTUG members also met with and provided Sun’s Customer Service organization with feedback on how well Sun is succeeding in their service transformation that began in October, 2007.

You may ask why am I writing about this event. I believe it is important for you to understand that Sun has continued the LTUG heritage that began in 1988 and has enriched it with its continued innovative research and development in tape storage solutions. The strength and industry-leading capabilities of Sun’s tape business is largely the result of LTUG and, if your company satisfy the minimal requirements, you too can be a member.

As I spoke with different members, including the chairman of the z/OS-mainframe tape group and an at-large member from the open tape group, I received a very common theme: LTUG is a unique user group in the industry in that the members are able to speak with and listen to the engineering and service executives and the product managers during the daily agenda, and to visit the engineers that are researching and developing the tape products during an evening event at Sun’s Solution Center in Broomfield, Colorado. Beyond this, the members receive advanced insight into future tape and storage solutions that Sun is researching and developing.

Some of the objectives and goals of LTUG are:

• Sharing of user experiences where tape storage challenges and problems have arisen and have been solved.
• Identifying user requirements of future tape solutions to keep abreast of the changes in the storage industry.
• Providing members with the ability to openly communicate with other members.
• Participating in monthly conference calls – lead by the members, not Sun – to further share and disseminate information. Two separate call are held monthly: one related to open and another to mainframe environments.
• Availing members to two in-person meetings per year with Sun tape engineering, service and product management.

The importance of LTUG to Sun is almost impossible to measure because of the invaluable feedback that is received from the members. By listening to the LTUG membership, Sun is better able to market products that meet the pressing needs of the customer, understand the value of the product enhancements prior to taking them to market, increase customer satisfaction with both tape solutions and service, and create its industry-leading tape solutions.

A few of the highlights at this Spring’s LTUG meeting:

• Sun’s engineers and product managers provided the members with updates on Sun's full tape storage product line, including roadmap discussions on Sun’s industry leading virtual tape, tape automation, and tape technologies.
• Special guest and industry leading storage analyst, Fred Moore, President of Horison, Inc., updated the members on the latest trends and directions in the storage industry. He also provided the members with his latest white paper - "Sun Storage Augments Mainframe Renaissance."
• LTUG members were also able to tour the recently built state-of-the-art Sun Solution Center in Broomfield, Colorado. During the tour, LTUGers were able to preview the newest technologies being developed by the engineers themselves and received a demo of Sun's next generation tape technology! Beyond this, the member were able to discuss the technologies with engineers that research and develop the solutions based on those technologies.

Maybe this sounds interesting to you and you would like to join LTUG. As mentioned before the requirements to join LTUG are minimal, just meet one of the following two requirements:

• Own or manage 10,000 or more tape cartridge slots in Sun / StorageTek tape libraries
• Have a minimum of 1.0 PB of data resident in Sun / StorageTek tape libraries

Not onerous requirements for enterprises based on the latest figures I have read that data is growing at a compounded growth rate of 60% annually. If you are interested in LTUG membership, you can submit your application at the following site:

www.sun.com/storage/ltug

Who benefits from LTUG? The companies that the members represent and Sun. Sounds like a win-win to me!

Yesterday, 21th April 2009, there was a press release from the LTO Consortium describing survey results showing that 66 percent of storage environments utilize a tiered storage infrastructure of disk and tape to address their storage requirements for performance, data retention compliance, disaster recovery and total cost of ownership.

This is consistent with the survey results that were described in the 12th March 2008 press release that strongly suggested that storage customers that use a disk-only infrastructure were looking at tape storage technology as part of a tiered storage infrastructure to support backup and archiving.

More and more of you are coming to the realization that disk-only is a incomplete storage tiering strategy.

Share this news with your peers and management as those that believe disk is sufficient for all storage strategies and tiers have not kept up with the news and do not seem to understand the technological, economical, or ecological benefits of tape.

Today, Sun made available the most significant set of enhancements to the mainframe virtual tape market since this market began in 1998 by StorageTek and IBM.

In 1998, StorageTek made available its first Virtual Storage Manager (VSM) system that leveraged the well structured Hierarchical Storage Manager and Tape Management System software that customers already had in place. At that time VSM was a system that would accelerate tape processing by having a disk buffer virtualize a physical tape drive. StorageTek also provided virtual tape management software that allowed for migrations of one or more of the virtual tape volumes from the disk buffer onto physical tape – the most cost effective data storage even today.

Fast forward 11 years. What has changed? The basic principles of tape virtualization are the same but what has evolved is from a business perspective. Primarily driven by ever changing customer requirements, changes in regulatory requirements, and the ever increasing amount of data that must be stored and protected for very long periods of time.

VSM has evolved to meet these ever changing requirements. Today's availability of the new VSM5 enhancements and Enterprise Library Software (ELS) keeps VSM in the technological lead by providing a broader range of solutions that solve real problems. The following are some of the enhancements that are now available:

1. DR has been enhanced in two very important areas. Sun’s clustering capability has been improved by 100%. Now up to 4 VSM subsystems can exist within the same clustered environment. These are all under one central point of control and provide tremendously more flexibility when configuring for high availability when a disaster occurs. In addition, data can now be electronically exported and imported to other VSM controlled tapeplexes. These improvements compliment the VSM disaster recovery choices that have been industry leading in the mainframe virtual tape market for many years.
2. Configuration flexibility has been improved. No other vendor provides the option to have or not have physical tape automation attached to the same virtual tape environment. This implementation provides the ability to selectively use physical tape automation. For example you could keep your data in a local VSM buffer and selectively migrate data to a remote VSM environment that does have tape automation attached. This is all managed by VSM which can dramatically reduce the complexity of tape operations and drive down the overall cost of storage.
3. Larger disk buffers allow for more data to be kept on disk longer prior to being migrated to tape. As the amount of data grows and data access frequency patterns change more data needs to remain on disk. VSM already provided from 1.25TB to 28TBs of effective disk storage within each VSM5 subsystem. Today, VSM5 buffer sizes can now be over three times larger going up to 90TBs. You should be able to find the size that fits your requirements to optimize the data migration and recall activity within your integrated virtual tape library environment.
4. Now adding ESCON channels to VSM5. If the ESCON channel protocol is still critical to your mainframe environment Sun is now providing you ESCON channels to be attached to its latest and greatest VSM5 solution. Sun is the only vendor to provide ESCON for their virtual tape library offering and also provides the choice of having a mixture of ESCON/FICON channels. If you have not fully implemented FICON across your mainframe environment this option allows you to do so within stages and leverages the latest set of VSM5 functions and features.
5. New native IP connectivity option. Sun is even providing you with the option to utilize your intranet backbone network between your sites in addition to the specialized ESCON or FICON extended channel protocols. So if your TCP/IP network has additional bandwidth, why not exploit that bandwidth with your mainframe VSM solution?

What does all of this mean? Sun understands what you need in your mainframe virtual tape environment and now provides you with additional choices that can leverage your existing infrastructure. Now you can scale from smaller to larger environments. At the same time providing you with ways to minimize the risks to your data and lower your costs by providing more channel interface flexibility, larger disk buffers, and enhanced DR capabilities.

If you wish to receive more information on what was made available today let me know and I would be pleased to discuss this with you further.