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!