1. On May 7th - Larry said so in his interview with Reuter's
2. Sun's tape is a significant proportion of Sun's overall sales and service revenue.
3. Sun's tape portfolio is viewed as the best in breed in every category. Sun tape is recognized as an innovator and leader in this market segment and over the past 18 months Sun has refreshed its entire tape hardware and software portfolio
4. Sun and Fujifilm announced the expansion of their relationship on next generation tape drive and media development on May 19th.
5. Sun's tape products are installed in many of the world's largest companies
6. Sun's tape automation is #1 in factory out tape automation revenue according to IDC
7. Sun's tape automation received top honors in Storage Magazine's Quality awards. In the enterprise space Sun tape automation has received this award for the 4th time in 2009 for the 4 years the award has been given
8. Tape's future is clearly positioned as the most green, energy efficient, and price leading storage for unreferenced and long-term archival enterprise data. Tape is up to 290 times more energy efficient and up to 23 times less expensive than SATA disk.
9. On September 22nd - Larry Ellison said so at the Churchill Club event during his conversation with Ed Zander
10. On October 27th Oracle provided additional insight stating “Sun brings … leadership in long-term information management and retention … . We plan to enhance investments in Sun’s storage core areas … .”

If you doubt any of this, please request an update from your authorized Sun Storage representative.

Did you notice or hear about the insightful conversation between Larry Ellison and Ed Zander on Monday, September 21 2009, at the Churchill Club forum? No? Well here are a few of the insightful answers that Larry provided to Ed's questions:

1. Larry implies the combined company or Oracle and Sun will be voraciously competitive against IBM. Some vendors have been creating tremendous FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) among some of you and your companies regarding the future of the combined Oracle / Sun company: "We've already beaten IBM in software, now, if everyone will let us, we will beat IBM in hardware," Ellison said. "That is our goal." According to InformationWeek

2. From the conversation you can sense the conviction of Larry Ellison to become a market leading "Systems" vendor and a company that is superior to the current IBM. In fact he wants to be the IBM from yester-year when IBM was the market leading solutions vendor:

“But we want to be T. J. Watson’s IBM,” he said, referring to the CEO who led the company in the 1950s and 1960s.

He continued: “T.J. Watson’s IBM was the greatest company in the history of enterprise in America because its combination of hardware and software was running most of the enterprises on the planet. We think with the combination of Sun technology and Oracle technology we can succeed and beat IBM. That’s our goal."

Refer to the WSJ Blog for additional information.

3. Also, there are a tremendous number of other quotes from various sources. For example, the eChannelLine with the following quotes are extracted:

   "Oracle will become a storage, software and systems company," Ellison said, specifically mentioning "storage" first.

   "Sun has great open storage systems. It has the best archival tape systems around [in the StorageTek product line]," Ellison said. "The amount of the world's data continues to grow and isn't going to slow down anytime soon. We see great opportunities in that sector, and we certainly will have the technology to sell into it with Sun.

   "We have no interest in the hardware business," Ellison said. "We have a deep interest in the systems business. Great systems vendors ship a hardware-software combination that allows them to be instrumental in the acceleration of the Internet.

   "We think that by providing our software with hardware ... we can deliver systems that can be the backbone of most enterprises around the world. It's really a combination of the two."

The message I want to leave you with today is simple: Trust us. Sun has superior products and solutions. Some vendors are creating tremendous FUD because they see our current transition period as one where they may try to take advantage of you. I do not believe these vendors have your best business interest at heart. They seemingly want to create FUD and try to take advantage of your company. The conversation between Larry Ellison with Ed Zander is an excellent example of what Larry expects from the combined Oracle / Sun company. The bottomline from my perspective is as follows:

1. The combine organization will be a fantastic Systems company.
2. Oracle, via Larry Ellison, intends to keep the tape portfolio.
3. Sun has tremendous roadmaps that are being followed.
4. I expect Oracle to be a company you can trust without FUD.

One of the complaints I read and hear about in a mainframe tape environment is the time it takes to backup all of your disk data to tape. Mainframe tape backup applications have been known to have small block sizes and have not leveraged the speed of the latest FICON channel types. However, there have been numerous technologies that have come along to speed up tape backup processing. Tape originally became a part of the storage hierarchy in 1952 when it was the primary storage device. Did you know that disk was invented four years after tape in 1956? Also, it was in 1998 that virtual tape solutions came to market. Since 1998 there have been significant technological advancements that have enabled the acceleration of tape backups both from a hardware and software perspective.

If you wanted, you could eliminate tapes from your environment completely. However, there are potential risks involved in the elimination of tape that go along with an increased total cost of ownership. I have written often about the need to have a balance of storage device types to support a tiered storage strategy and that tape is a critical part of the whole. You can refresh your memory by reading a few of the following blog entries:

• Data DeDupe - A Part of the Whole
• The Value Continues
• Tape and Disk: Thriving Together

One solution that I have not written about previously is Sun's Extended High Performance Data Mover (ExHPDM). By interleaving many backup streams into one, ExHPDM enables full utilization of

• high-speed channels,
• high-speed high-capacity tape drives,
• high capacity media, and
• high-capacity, high-speed disk subsystems.

In a structured benchmark, Sun was able to decrease the elapsed time for disk backup by up to 11 times with Sun's latest 1TB T10000B tape drive technology. This software solution will benefit both Sun and IBM enterprise tape drives.

If you would like to learn more about ExHPDM and how you can backup your data at maximum speed, read the latest white paper regarding the benchmark and contact your Sun Storage Representative.

When Sun acquired StorageTek it created such a powerful research and development combination that they have produced and have been recognized, again, with the top honors in Storage magazine’s fourth annual Quality Awards for tape libraries.

This is the third time in four years that the Sun/StorageTek enterprise libraries have received the top quality award. The midrange libraries have received the top recognition twice. Read more about Storage Magazine’s Quality Awards.

The combination of market leadership and quality leader in tape automation is one of reasons other vendors don't want you to hear about all the great innovative solutions that Sun's research and development department have produced. Find out for yourself.

With the explosion of data, some estimate in the range of 60% annually, you need a way to rein in the uncontrolled growth of storage devices in your enterprise. Additionally you need a way to simplify storage management and operational complexity, while reducing energy consumption and costs.

Some vendors believe the answer is disk. They believe disk arrays are the answer to every storage question and issue. You have pushed back and new technologies, such as data deduplication, have been developed. Although data deduplication is a fantastic technology in the right places, it still does not tame the data explosion and resulting costs to satisfy your storage needs. Again these are disk vendors or vendors that believe disk can solve every storage issue and answer every storage question now and into the future.

So what is the answer? You and I both know it is a balanced blend of disk and tape that can ultimately address your data explosion and storage needs. Why keep data on disk when the likelihood of being referenced after 90 days is almost zero? Why continue to consume energy with data that is unlikely to be referenced? Why continue to take up invaluable floor space in your data center with disk arrays when Terabytes and Petabytes of long term storage on tape is more cost, energy, and space efficient? Sun advocates a true tiered storage strategy, with a mix of Disk, Tape, Virtual Storage and effective Software Management.

On July 14th Sun presented a webinar on how you can consolidate and save on storage costs within your enterprise, from the tape perspective. Watch it now and receive new insights on how Sun's tape automation solutions can benefit your open, mainframe or mixed data storage environments.

In the past week a leading analyst provided the industry with the truth about the market leading vendors in the tape automation industry. The results may surprise you but here are the facts:

1. Sun is the market leader in total factory out automation and extended its lead in the first quarter of 2009.
2. The SL500 has climbed from a second place market share position in 2007 to the market share leader as of the first quarter 2009 in the 100-500 tape automation sub-category.
3. The >1000 slot automation sub-category is led by Sun and continues to grow. This is mostly a result of the industry leading SL8500.
4. Sun's Enterprise tape drives (the T9840D and T10000B) have also gained share since 2007 and were the market leader in enterprise drive shipments as of first quarter of 2009.

Sun has gained share across the spectrum of tape automation and enterprise tape drives since 2007 and the first quarter results of 2009 prove these facts.

These facts prove once again the Sun is committed to and is investing in the Enterprise Tape Automation and Drive business to be the market leader in the tape industry.

Last week Sun received FIPS 140-2 Certification for two of their Enterprise Tape Drives. The T10000A is certified at Security Level 1 while the T100000B is certified at Security Level 2. While IBM has also received FIPS 140-2 certification for their TS1120 and LTO4 drives, both drives are at Security Level 1 and IBM, at the time of this posting, has not submitted the TS1130 for certification.

Sun has achieved an industry-first with the Security Level 2 classification of T10000B showing that all aspects of the drive functionality and physical security meet the higher requirements implicit in the Security Level 2 classification. If you wish to read about the 11 criteria for the different levels that need to be met to receive FIPS 140-2 certification view table 1 on page 12 of the “Security Requirements for Cryptographic Modules” document.

The third Sun Enterprise Drive, the T9840D, has completed its testing and the results have been submitted to NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) for validation and issuance of the FIPS 140-2 Certificate.

No need to take chances with the safety of your data. Secure and encrypt your open systems or mainframe data with the most secure drives in the industry.

Another example of Sun's investments and commitment to Enterprise Tape technology.

Today IBM announced the new FICON Express8 features for their z10 servers. What does that mean for the Sun Storagetek customers with tape solutions currently connected to a z10 server? As usual, Sun has you covered and it is full speed ahead. Because of Sun's relationship with IBM, Sun has already tested and certified its tape solutions with the new FICON Express8 features. These cards are designed to support a link rate of 8 gigabits per second (Gbps) with autonegotiation to 2 or 4 Gbps to support existing devices for added investment protection.

Great news for the Sun customers and another example of Sun's investment and commitment to keeping current with the latest mainframe technology.

There is so much buzz in the market these days about data deduplication. If you are like me, you receive numerous emails every day that contain a reference to data dedupe. These references typically provide you with a short description about the value of data dedupe and how the specific vendor has been able to tame the explosion of data. After reading the short description you can download a white paper, register for a webinar, watch a video-cast, listen to a podcast, or get something that promises to enlighten you about the promised benefits of data deduplication. Now you may think I am being harsh with these words implying empty promises from a technology that is so innovative, elegant, and complex all at the same time. So you rightly can ask me what is your answer to your exploding data issue? I am grateful that you have asked and I will provide you with an answer. One you may not expect from me.

Why is data deduplication receiving so much press these days? This innovative technology provides you with the promise of reducing the amount of data you store on disk by identifying your duplicate data and ultimately storing only one copy. Further, this innovative technology has invented elaborate processes so that the one saved copy can be located by all the applications that had previously saved the data. Additionally, some data dedupe processes examine files – some of which could be compliance type files – to find repetitive bit patterns to further improve the dedupe ratio. A very very slick and elegant technology and one that has tremendous potential when leveraged within the whole of storage tiers and the storage hierarchy.

Now if your organization is typical you are likely seeing your data growing around a 45% compounded annualized growth rate (CAGR). That is enough to send fear into the heart of most storage administrators because they are asking the question, “How will I be able to store all this data on primary disk particularly in today's economic environment when I have little or no budget for new hardware acquisitions and every request undergoes intense scrutiny?” Let's consider for a moment business as usual and that there are no data deduplication solutions available. To solve this data explosion it will take money to buy the additional storage, likely more people to manage the additional storage, space in the data center to install the additional storage, and electricity to power and cool all the additional storage. All of components have a large price tag. If you look at the latest trends in the industry, you notice that the price tag of the storage management and operations people can be up to 3x the hardware price, the electrical costs are rapidly approaching and in some places exceeding the hardware price, and many organizations are running out of floor space – another limited resource. So when you add it all up you may have to take into account a minimum of 5x the storage hardware price tag to manage, maintain, upgrade, power, cool, and install all of this additional storage.

A great example of most of these costs, excluding personnel costs, is shown in the Clipper Notes paper, referenced in my 2009 May 9 blog, where the cost of a quarterly backup disk solution over 5 years for data growing at 50% CAGR starting at 50 TB and growing to 253 TB is estimated to be approximately $14.7 million US dollars. This also, takes into account the typical useful life of disk of three years on disk so the new expected technology is included in the analysis.

That is before data dedupe comes into the picture. So is that the secret sauce? Assume – and this can be a job limiting assumption – that you are able to get a 20:1 data dedupe benefit. According to this Clipper Notes paper, they made that assumption and estimated that the impact of a data dedupe environment would reduce the overall quarterly backup disk solution to a cost of approximately $3 million US dollars. That is a eye popping reduction in price so why am I so suspicious about the value of data dedupe?

To answer that, you need to understand your data well. For example if you have an application that backs up your data incrementally “forever”, the likely dedupe ratio will be very small. It will not approach a 20:1 ratio and it is likely that data dedupe ratio will be less than the data compression ratio. Now what if you do full data backups every day? First of all, I would ask why are you doing full backups every day? But if that were the case, your data dedupe ratio would likely be very large. For example if you change only 1% of your data daily and you are adding 0.1% new data daily (for the 45% CAGR), you would see in the range of almost 100:1 dedupe ratio. Fantastic. But again I would really question why you would do a full backup every day. Let's compromise and use the assumptions from the Clipper Notes paper: Full backup weekly, incrementals daily where 5% of your data changes. So under the assumptions approximately 92% of your data does not change during the week. That would provide you with about a 12:1 to 13:1 dedupe ratio. Smaller than the Clipper Notes paper assumption of 20:1 but still respectable. Full speed ahead with data dedupe. Right? Well let's be careful. Your mileage will vary based on your specific data environment. Know your data and understand what data is likely a good candidate for data dedupe because your backups may be essentially incremental forever which may provide you with a dedupe ratio less than the typical data compression ratio.

Also, you will want to verify the validity of the assumptions as cautioned in the Clipper Notes paper compared to your environment. For example the cost of electricity, the floor space costs, be sure to include the cost of additional personnel to manage the data, adjust for vendor discounts on the hardware, use utilization levels for disk and tape media representative of your environment, and leverage the cost advantages of newer hardware in the later years of the 5 year analysis. Further, based on the publication “Panorama Storage” by Fred Moore, President of Horison Information Strategies, “By 2010, it is expected that a tool rich non-mainframe storage administrator should be able to effectively manage approximately 28 terabytes of storage....” So these costs should definitely be taken into account. One last point, the baseline amount of data that is kept long term is a very critical assumption. If your environment is larger than the 50 TB environment used as the initial baseline for the Clipper Notes paper, the costs of the disk environment will increase almost linearly whereas this is not the situation for tape environments. All of these factors can have a major impact on the final results.

OK so I have highlighted an example where the cost of a 5 year quarterly backup pure disk solution can have radically lower costs, ,maybe as much as 5x lower, when incorporating data dedupe within your environment. I have also warned you about making the underlying assumptions realistic to your environment. So you may now ask me why am I so less than 100% enthusiast about data dedupe?

Based on my background it is critical that you understand the benefits of each storage tier within the storage hierarchy. The storage hierarchy includes tape. So, based on this, if costs are critical to you these days due to your stagnant or shrinking budgets, than consider an alternative to the quarterly backup example. Tape! Referencing the Clipper Notes paper again, the costs of the 5 year quarterly backup scenario on tape is estimated to be less than $650,000 US dollars. Approximately 23x less that the disk environment without data dedupe and almost 5x less than the data dedupe estimate. So leveraging your tape automation environment in this example can make you a prudent fiscal conservative within your company during these lean times.

Going back to data dedupe for a moment. There is definitely a place for this technology but go into it with your eyes open. For example, when I asked about data deduplication among my peers, I received responses that I must share with you to give you some additional insight when evaluating data deduplication solutions that are in the market:

• Understand the problem that you need to solve. From a simple TCO perspective, remember that disk environments including a data dedupe environment will likely need a 'tech refresh' every 3 years, tape drives are good for about 5 years, and tape automation for 7 - 10 years. Some companies have leveraged tape drives and libraries for much longer and the media life is up to 30 years.
• How easy will it be to migrate deduped data from one system to another when the disk needs to be refreshed? Will the data need to be reconstructed into its native format than deduped again?
• For bulk data backup and restore, tape is faster than disk, including data dedupe environments.
• What happens if there is a logical corruption in the dedupe repository? Keep a copy on tape.
• Does the deduped file conform to requirements for legislation? That is, in a court of law will you be able to prove the data has not changed? Keep a verifiable copy on tape.
• As your data dedupe environment grows beyond a single dedupe system for a specific type of data (i.e, your email system, your data base system) will the additional system have a global view of all the data being dedupe? If not, you may end up having to manage independent islands of dedupe systems for load balancing or to keep your dedupe ratio high. So understand the difference between a data dedupe system that has a global vs. a local view of the data.
• Does the data dedupe system allow you to easily accommodate data replication and sending a copy to tape?
• Does the data dedupe vendor have maintenance and service personnel that are quickly accessible and knowledgeable of the solution when an issue arises?
• How quickly can the data that has been deduped be restored? If it is a few files you likely will not be concerned about the time to reconstitute the data. But what if the entire disk farm needs to be restored? Will you be able to restore it fast enough to recovery your business? It takes time to dedupe your data during your backup and time to reconstruct your data for recovery. Be sure to understand the time it takes in your environment compared to your native backup procedures. You do not want any questions or surprises about being able to backup your data within your backup window and being able to recover your data to meet your service levels.

What does all of this mean? Data dedupe is a huge step forward to help reduce the amount of data stored on disk. It is a part of the entire storage hierarchy. It is an innovative and elegant solution but it does not approach the cost and value of tape. As a world renowned backup expert, W. Curtis Preston, Executive Editor at TechTarget and independent backup expert stated in his “Let's Talk About Deduplication” Video-cast, “I am not talking about deduping everything to one copy and then leaving it there. That would be, you know, stupid, alright, although I have had people do that. ... So your choices are to replicate it, to copy to tape, or replicate it and then copy to tape, or if you like, copy to tape and replicate it, right, just depends on what you want to do.”

Leverage the various parts of the storage hierarchy that will serve you best. Each part has it specific purpose that has served the industry well for at least the past 45 years and even with the new additions into the hierarchy see them as additions, not replacements.

Sun apparently was too busy to notice the rumors in the industry that tape, like the mainframe, is dead. What is happening at Sun such that both their overall tape business grew by 3% and their mainframe attached storage business grew by double digit percentage in the latest quarterly results?

“Sun Sees Growth in Data Tape Storage”

IBM is not claiming growth in their tape business nor have I heard a word about their mainframe storage business growing. In their latest prepared remarks that are available on the web, IBM states “Storage revenue declined 20 percent year to year, with double-digit declines in both disk and tape.” IBM continue their statement by adding that “Our tape performance was in line with the market.” Seems like IBM forgot to notice that Sun's tape business was up 3% during the same quarter when IBM's tape business was down double-digit but in line with the market. What market are they referring to? Apparently not the mainframe storage market.

But why is Sun's tape business growing? Quietly to the industry but very boisterously to its customers, Sun has been making significant inroads in the overall tape business and, in particular, the mainframe attached storage business. Now the word has gotten out.

“Sun tweaks tape platform while waiting for Oracle to take over”

“Sun Adds New Virtualization and Software Technologies to Industry Leading Tape Archive Portfolio”

“Sun Upgrades Its Virtualized Tape Archive”

This latest announcement on April 14, 2009, is just the latest in a series of announcements that have taken place over the past 18 months to refresh and enhance the entire line of tape products at Sun including the mainframe Virtual Storage Manager - VSM5, the SL8500 and SL3000 libraries, the T9840D and T10000B tape drives, and KMS 2.0 encryption. Sun has invested greatly in the enterprise and mainframe tape business to allow for growth this last quarter.

Sun also announced that Fujifilm will be the tape media development partner for the next generation of the Sun StorageTek T10000 tape drive family, building upon the relationship that yielded the industry's first one terabyte (TB) drive to bring more tape archive innovation to customers.

But what about the impact of the Oracle acquisition on Sun? Well if you read all the opinions on the web you will likely become very confused so I will let Oracle's CEO, Larry Ellison, speak about this topic. On May 7, 2009, Larry explicitly stated that “Disk storage and tape backup are critical components in high-performance, high-reliability, high-security database systems. So, we plan to design and deliver those pieces too. Clearly many Sun customers choose disk and tape systems from other vendors. That’s what open systems are all about: providing customers with a choice. But Oracle expects to continue competing in both the disk and tape storage businesses after we buy Sun.”

“Oracle Plans to Keep Sun's Storage Business”

“Transcript of an Interview with Larry Ellison by Reuters on the Acquisition of Sun Microsystems”

It is an exciting time to be in the tape business and even more so for the mainframe storage business at Sun.

My focus today is to provide you with an easy to find collection of white papers and other documents that show the value of tape and virtual tape libraries in both open and mainframe environments. I provided you with a subset of this content back in January and believe it is time to provide you with an update:

Mainframe Storage Solutions Remain Best in Class. The latest paper by Fred Moore – Learn about the roots of enterprise computing from the mainframe perspective and find out more about Sun's newest mainframe storage offerings.

The Market Opportunity for Enterprise Tape. Which tape drive technology should you choose? Enterprise-class tape technologies are equipped with reliability features for the 24x7 high duty cycle requirements of today's data center. This IDC white paper presents the case for enterprise tape technologies and why not all backup applications should be treated equally.

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.

Disk and Tape Square Off Again - Tape Remains King of the Hill with LTO-4. This is a paper written by Clipper Group that provides excellent insights to the cost differences between disk and tape of the same capacity. This paper found out that tape was up to 23x lower in cost and up to 290x lower in energy costs. Tape is truly a green technology.

The Truth about Tape - Nine Myths to Reconsider. There are myths about tape that need to be dispelled. This Clipper Group paper identifies nine of those myths and provides you with an updated view of tape. Also, since this paper was published in February, 2007, the reality of tape's usage and developments have further improved the case for tape. This is supported by other papers referenced in the complete list provided in this entry.

If you have documents that provide additional insight to the value of tape or virtual tape library, please let me know.

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.

Today, I am taking a departure from my typical focus on enterprise storage.

On March 2, Jonathan Schwartz, CEO and President of Sun, posted the first of a four-part video-blog series about Sun's future. If you aren't following it, I think you may be interested in watching the videos or reading the blogs. The series covers the three things Sun needs to do and why. These blog entries are laid out in the following order:

• Understanding Sun in Three Easy Steps (1 of 4)
• Technology Adoption (2 of 4)
• Commercial Innovation (3 of 4)
• Efficiently Connecting Adoption and Commercial Innovation (4 of 4)