H P O EM NEWSLETTER – MARCH 201 0
• LT0-5 - the world’s most popular tape technology • Meeting today’s customer challenges • Introducing HP LTO-5 Ultrium drives and libraries • LTO Ultrium market popularity • LTO-3 to LTO-5 upgrade opportunity
HP launches fifth generation of the
world’s most popular tape drive – LTO-5
Contents
This latest member
of the HP LTO Ultrium
family provides
a performance
growth path, while
continuing to deliver
the reliability, security
and TCO benefits that
users of the world’s
most popular tape
drive technology have
come to expect.
The LTO Ultrium technology format, developed jointly by HP, IBM and Quantum, continues to thrive as the world’s leading tape technology in terms of shipments and revenue. According to IDC data reported in the Q3’09 world-wide quarterly tape market share report, LTO technology accounted for 57% share of
world-wide tape drive shipments in the first three quarters of 2009 with over 281,000 LTO Ultrium factory exit tape drives shipped. Moreover, LTO Ultrium drives represented 96% of all tape drives that shipped in the buoyant mid-range tape market in Q3’09, with AIT holding 2.7% and SDLT holding 1% market share.
The strength of the LTO Ultrium format is further demonstrated by the fact that IDC’s Q1’09 tape market report showed that LTO drive shipments exceeded three million units since the format’s introduction in 2000. This remarkable achievement demonstrates continued demand for the format driven by it being an open standard and by the data protection portability, reliability and the low total cost of ownership (TCO) advantages that tape storage continues to offer to organisations of
all sizes.
LTO Ultrium: meeting today’s data
protection challenges
Regardless of the size of organisation, to some degree today’s IT managers are facing a common set of issues with respect to data protection; namely the ongoing exponential growth of data that needs to be stored, protected and archived for business or compliance purposes, together with the need to control the associated infrastructure costs of managing all this data while providing for business continuity.
A recent survey by ZDNet shows that business continuity, information security and IT efficiency issues are of upmost concern to today’s IT Managers.
Consolidation
Office Systems Collaboration
LTO Ultrium solutions are able to help address these data protection challenges in the following ways:
While disk-based data protection products may provide for faster restore and mission critical business continuity, tape remains a key component in the data center. As W Curtis Preston of TechTarget wrote last month (February 2010), concerning the forthcoming launch of LTO-5 technology: “There are many people that are not enamoured with disk backup or they don’t need it, some people haven’t been bitten by the data deduplication bug. Some have done the math and found that tape is still cheaper, even after deduplication. There is still a huge market for tape for backup as well as for data archiving.”
“There is still a huge
market for tape for
backup as well as for
data archiving.”
IT data protection challenges
HP LTO Ultrium enables... How can we reduce IT infrastruture costs? How can we manage risk, enhance security and ensure compliance? How can we keep up with data growth and changing business needs? Consolidation and automation of data protection Off-line storage, long-term archival additional levels of data security High capacity/ small footprint low $/GB, energy efficient & easily scalable W Curtis Preston, TechTarget
There are nine key and compelling reasons for the continued success of tape, and LTO Ultrium in particular:
Tape technology is experiencing a Renaissance;
a rebirth based on the growing recognition that
tape technology is responding regularly and
reliably to today’s vital business requirements.
Mark Ferrelli - ‘Tape’s Green Role in the Data Center’, March 2009
1. Low total cost of ownership LTO remains the most economical way to protect large amounts of data, especially
when taking energy-efficiency into account. 2. Energy efficient – the green
solution LTO-5 tape drives require far less energy than similar capacity disk systems, where spinning disks constantly require power and cooling. By contrast, tape requires a fraction of the energy for writing and reading data, and none at all for a cartridge in a slot or on a shelf.
3. Ability to consolidate
storage The high capacity of LTO Ultrium provides for more data storage in the same footprint, especially when using automated tape libraries. The high capacity and small footprint of a LTO-5 tape drive and tape cartridge provides a cost advantage that is often overlooked, particularly in long-term archival and offsite storage scenarios.
4. Single solution Effective solution for all aspects of data protection including backup, disaster recovery
and archival.
5. Added security Data is offline to threats, and LTO Ultrium offers the added security of WORM and
hardware based data encryption with LTO-5 and LTO-4.
6. Removable Secure and easy transportation, and cost-effective off-site storage for disaster
recovery and archival purposes.
7. Long lasting The best shelf life available, specified by LTO media manufacturers as in excess of 30
years.
8. Established LTO Ultrium is a ubiquitous solution that is widely available and widely supported by
systems and software, it is a known quantity with people and processes already in place.
9. Easily scalable Using tape libraries in particular, it is easy to scale tape solutions to keep pace with
Introducing HP LTO-5 Ultrium
The highest capacity LTO Ultrium tape drive, HP LTO-5 Ultrium full-height and half-height tape drives are capable of storing up to 3TB per cartridge in under three hours. They continue to build on HP LTO proven reliability and offer added levels of data security with AES 256-bit hardware-based data encryption.
HP LTO-5 drives - meeting business
challenges
Whether standalone, rack-mounted or in an autoloader or tape library, the HP LTO-5 Tape drive helps to address the following business challenges:
Keeping pace with data growth
Growth in the amount of information created, distributed and stored by businesses of all sizes continues unabated and seemingly unaffected by changes in economic climate. In their report, the Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe, IDC suggest that by 2011, users will install 6.5 times more data than in 2007. IDC also forecast that the amount of TB capacity per array will increase by 400% in next five years.
With the ability to store up to 3TB of compressed capacity (2:1) on a single cartridge, LTO-5 keeps pace with data growth - providing almost double the capacity of LTO-4, and almost four times the capacity of current LTO-3 Ultrium tape drives.
For customers with rapidly growing businesses, HP LTO- 5 Ultrium tape drives provide customers with the ability to reduce the number of tape swaps during backup, and have fewer tape cartridges to store or manage.
• 3TB of compressed storage capacity • 1TB/ hour compressed transfer rate • Hardware-based AES 256-Bit encryption • WORM media available
• Two-generation backward compatibility • 6Gbps SAS or 8Gbps FC interfaces • Available in a range of models
Meeting backup windows
Spiralling data growth also means that customers are struggling to backup ever increasing amounts of data within their existing backup windows. As a consequence, they are forced to put up with lower performance until backup jobs have completed, are having to accept that backups may require multiple tapes, and are having to endure longer system down time.
The LTO 5 Ultrium tape drive’s 1TB/hr (compressed 2:1) transfer rate and fast 6b/s SAS interface means that 3TB of compressed (2:1) data can be backed up onto a single LTO-5 Ultrium
cartridge in three hours. The key to this efficient performance lies in the combination of high tape drive speeds and the unique HP Dynamic Data Rate Matching feature which optimizes performance by adjusting the speed of the tape to variable host and network speeds to keep the tape drive streaming.
Reducing infrastructure costs HP LTO 5 Ultrium tape drives allow customers with tight budgets to minimize the overall cost (both from a capital expenditure and operational expenditure perspective) of protecting their data. LTO-5 facilitates storage consolidation by cost-effectively storing a large amount of data in a small footprint, with 75% fewer LTO-5 tapes required than LTO-3 for the same amount of stored data. When used in a Tape Library, this benefit is even more pronounced.
Furthermore, LTO-5 Ultrium media also offers one of the lowest $/GByte of any storage technology, delivering a cost of less than 5 cents per compressed gigabyte (based on estimated street pricing).
Offering compressed speeds of up to 1TB/hour, HP LTO 5 Ultrium tape drives
enable customers to spend less time ensuring that the business data on their
server is protected.
Tape can also play an important part in reducing TCO as part of a tiered storage infrastructure that combines disk and tape. A question that customers may like to ask themselves is; ‘why waste money paying for disk storage, only to quickly get to data you’re unlikely to ever want to access?’ A study conducted by the University of California, Santa Cruz, suggests that 95% of data may never be accessed again beyond 90 days after creation - so why fly all your data ‘first class’ when ‘coach’ will do? Tape has long been recognised for its energy efficiency over disk based data storage. For a whitepaper on the TCO comparison of disk and tape, please refer to www.ultrium.com.
Furthermore, data held on tape is off-line, which not only enhances data security by making it inaccessible to hackers or viruses, but also means that it has no ongoing power requirements other than those needed to write or restore the data. Standard hard drives on the other hand are continually spinning, consuming energy and generating heat.
Minimizing risk with enhanced data security
HP LTO 5 Ultrium tape drives provide customers with peace of mind that their business backup data is safe when being transported and stored off-site.
Headlines reporting data security breaches have become a regular occurrence in both public and private sectors, with the Identity Theft Resource Centre reporting that in the business sector, data breach climbed from 21% to 41% between 2006 to 2009, and the Ponemon Institute survey showing that the annual cost of data breach to organizations is rising dramatically to over $200 per file. Not surprisingly, data encryption is becoming a business imperative.
Following on from the success of LTO-4 encryption, the new HP LTO-5 tape drives and libraries feature hardware-based data encryption using the AES-GCM algorithm with 256 bit keys to provide the highest level of security available for tape today. Unlike software or other forms of data encryption, this embedded method of data encryption secures data on the backup tapes and provides transparent operation without disruption to servers, applications, backup windows, data restores or network flow. It also eliminates the need to purchase and manage additional encryption devices. By using hardware-based data encryption, HP LTO-5 and LTO-4 Tape Drives are able to compress data at the same time as they encrypt it, ensuring that backups are completed without a loss in performance.
Providing dependable data protection
The bottom-line for any data protection solution is the ability to dependably backup and restore data. HP LTO drives and libraries have a proven track record for reliability and performance and HP LTO-5 drives continue to build on this reputation. Like previous generations of HP LTO Ultrium drive, LTO-5 drives include a number of HP unique features (described in the next section: Why HP for LTO-5) that deliver enterprise class reliability.
The reliability of the HP LTO-5 drive is clearly denoted by a 250,000 hours MTBF specification at 100% duty cycle, or in other words a mean-time-between-failure rate of more than 28 years operating at a full 24x7 duty cycle.
The fact that data stored on tape is off-line to threats from hackers or viruses should also not be underestimated. Recent high-profile examples of companies who employed disk mirroring for data protection, only to find that errors and sabotage were mirrored from one server to another with disastrous consequences, have forcefully illustrated the dangers of confusing business continuity with data protection.
Investment protection
HP LTO-5 offers two generations backwards compatibility - protecting customers existing investments in previous generations of LTO-3 and LTO-4 media. HP LTO 5 Ultrium tape drives are also compatible with leading operating systems, backup software and servers. Read and Write backward compatibility between LTO-5 and LTO-4, plus read-compatibility with LTO-3 provides an easy upgrade path for customers with investment in previous generations of HP LTO Ultrium products. The robust LTO Ultrium future roadmap provides confidence in future growth opportunities. Furthermore, adding tape drives, libraries or media to cope with data and business growth is easy to do without additional investment in infrastructure.
PLEASE REFER TO THE BACK PAGE FOR MORE INFORMATION ON THE LTO-3 to LTO-5 UPGRADE OPPORTUNITY
“Tape’s ability to store more data in a given
footprint can help to address financial costs,
power usage and cooling floor space. For
inactive and archive data, or offline storage
needs, tape remains one the greenest forms
of data storage.”
Why HP for LTO Ultrium tape drives?
Performance optimizedThe key to efficient performance lies in the combination of high tape drive speeds and the unique HP dynamic Data Rate Matching feature. This algorithm adjusts the speed of the tape to match the speed of the data streaming from the host to prevent the continual repositioning of the head on the tape as it waits for more data in many typical environments. Avoiding this “shoe-shining” effect has numerous benefits including; enhancing overall performance, lessening head and tape wear, and reducing power requirements.
Best in class reliability
HP LTO Ultrium drives and Libraries significantly extend the boundaries of tape storage data integrity through features such as powerful error correction codes, timing based servo with dual/redundant servo heads, read-while-write verification and full recovery of a full lost track or up to 32mm of unreadable tape. A dependable leader capture design and soft load/unload mechanism for 100k loads, a simplified tape path, an active head cleaner and a rugged media/cartridge design combine to make sure that HP LTO Ultrium drives are ideally suited for automation solutions with 100% duty cycles.
Flexible solutions
HP offers an unrivalled choice of price and performance points for HP LTO Ultrium tape drives, autoloaders and tape libraries. With a choice of interface options and the industry’s most comprehensive list of compatible hardware and software platforms, the HP LTO drives will integrate seamlessly into the vast majority of system configurations. Market leadership
HP is one of the LTO Technology Provider companies and is the market leading LTO drive manufacturer today with over 50% unit share of the LTO tape drive market worldwide.
The key to efficient
performance lies
in the combination
of high tape drive
speeds and the
unique HP dynamic
Data Rate Matching
feature.
The HP LTO Drive family 3000 GB 3TB 1600 GB 1.6TB 800 GB 400 GB 200 GB Compr essed Capacity (2:1) 576 GB/hr 864 GB/hr 1TB/hr 173 GB/hr 432 GB/hr
Speed Gb/hour ( compressed 2:1)
LTO-5 FH & HH drives
LTO-4 FH drives
LTO-3 FH drives LTO-4 HH drives
LTO-3 HH drives
LTO-2 HH drives
HP LTO-2 HP LTO-3 HP LTO-4 HP LTO-5
Form factor Half height Half height Full height Full height Half height Full height Half height
Native capacity 200GB 400GB 400GB 800GB 800GB 1.5TB 1.5TB Compressed capacity (2:1) 400GB 800GB 800GB 1.6TB 1.6TB 3TB 3TB Native Transfer rate 24MB/s 60MB/s 80MB/s 120MB/s 80MB/s 140MB/s 140MB/s Compressed transfer rate in GB/hour (2:1) 173GB/hr 432GB/hr 576GB/hr 864GB/hr 576GB/hr 1TB/hr 1TB/hr
Interfaces Ultra3 SCSI
SAS 3Gb/s Ultra-320 SCSI (LVDS) SAS 3Gb/s Ultra-320 SCSI (LVDS) 4Gb/s FC Ultra-320 SCSI (LVDS) SAS 3Gb/s 4Gb/s FC Ultra-320 SCSI (LVDS) SAS 3Gb/s 4 Gb/s FC SAS 6Gb/s 8Gb/s FC SAS 6Gb/s 8Gb/s FC Format Compatibility LTO-2 LTO-1 LTO-3 LTO-2 LTO-1 LTO-3 LTO-2 LTO-1 LTO-4 LTO-3 LTO-2 LTO-4 LTO-3 LTO-2 LTO-5 LTO-4 LTO-3 LTO-5 LTO-4 LTO-3 WORM media
support n/a YES YES YES YES YES YES
Encryption n/a n/a n/a AES 256 bit AES 256 bit AES 256 bit AES 256 bit
HP LTO Ultrium
drives and Libraries
significantly extend
the boundaries of
tape storage data
integrity through
features such as
powerful error
correction codes
Where LTO-5 fits in the HP LTO Ultrium family of
HP LTO-5 drives
in HP OEM Tape
Libraries
HP Tape Libraries will also benefit from the enhanced capacity and performance of HP LTO-5 Ultrium drives.
HP 2U Library HP 4U Library HP 8U Library
Size 2U form factor 4U form factor 8U form factor
Capacity (2:1 compression) 72 TB LTO5 38.4 TB LTO4 19.2 TB LTO3 9.6 TB LTO2 144 TB LTO5 76.8 TB LTO4 38.4 TB LTO3 144 TB LTO5 (48 slots) 288 TB LTO5 (96 slots) 76. 8 TB LTO4 (48 slots) 153.6 TB LTO4 (96 slots) 38.4 TB LTO3 (48 slots) 76.8 TB LTO3 (96 slots) Drives
Supported LTO-5 FHLTO-4 FH LTO-4 HH LTO-3 FH LTO-3 HH LTO-2 HH LTO-5 FH LTO-4 FH LTO-4 HH LTO-3 FH LTO-3 HH LTO-5 FH LTO-4 FH LTO-4 HH LTO-3 FH
Interfaces Native Fibre Channel SCSI SAS
Native Fibre Channel SCSI SAS
Native Fibre Channel SCSI SAS
LTO Ultrium – ongoing popularity
The true measure of success for any technology, including tape, is market adoption. By any market share metric, LTO Ultrium has proved to be a resounding success. For almost three years, LTO Ultrium has accounted for more than half of all tape drives shipped, currently holding 56% of the overall tape drive market in the first three quarters of calendar 2009, according to IDC data. This high level of adoption signifies universal industry acceptance and support for the technology.
NOW WITH LTO-5
With 55% market-share, HP is the overall tape drive market leader, and the market leader in LTO Ultrium tape drive shipments.
The launch of LTO-5 Tape Drives signifies the continued commitment and investment in tape technology by today’s leading system manufacturers and media suppliers.
LTO-5 is set to continue the LTO Ultrium momentum within the tape technology market, providing a ready upgrade path for the installed base of over 3 million drives, and more particularly for LTO-3 and LTO-4 tape drive customers.
“The impending release of LTO-5
will be good for the entire tape
ecosystem: media vendors as
well as drive, tape library and
assorted systems vendors, and
even for non-LTO vendors who are
enhancing their technologies, it will
indirectly help by demonstrating
the continued investment and
enhancement to tape.”
Greg Schulz, Founder and Senior Analyst, StorageIO Group
Continued customer demand
According to a 2009 published survey conducted by Fleischman- Hillard, IT managers currently operating disk-only systems are increasingly realizing the value of tape as more than 60 percent stated their intent to add tape back into the storage hierarchy, and of those respondents, 78 percent plan to add tape storage solutions within the next 12 months. Nearly 40 percent of managers operating tape only environments are forecasting increased usage of tape, up from 22 percent last year. The survey focused on the views of more than 200 network administrators and mid-level
technology specialists at mid- to large-sized companies throughout the United States. “Our research tells us that many customers, large and small, still rely on tape storage for backup, archive and data protection...The tape industry is alive and well, and vendors have robust development and roadmaps for higher capacity points in the years to come.” Robert Amatruda, Research Director, IDC
Clearly customers remain committed to using tape in general and LTO Ultrium in particular, for robust data protection whether the tape is used on its own, or in a combined disk-to-disk-to-tape configuration. When it comes to data protection, tape remains the last line of defence.
And when it comes to HP LTO Ultrium, here’s what customers are saying:
“One of the most important features of the HP LTO-4 drive is its Data Rate
Matching feature, which optimizes performance of the streaming drives by
matching the host system speed. Our customers in the Media and Entertainment
world need to store large video files but sometimes have bottlenecks in the data
path, this feature allows the drive to continue to stream without shoe-shining. The
other real benefit in video is the increase in storage capacity to 800GBs native,
especially with the advent of High Definition in the television world.” - Storage reseller
The UK Government
department said it chose
a tape system, rather than
disk based storage, as it was
greener. It estimated that
a comparable disk based
system would have used
25 times as much energy,
as the disks use energy for
spinning and cooling even
when they are not reading or
writing data.
UK Government Organization using LTO Ultrium
In 2009, a large UK government department chose to implement a massive LTO Ultrium based Tape Library holding more than one petabytes of capacity, or one million gigabytes and the equivalent of 20 million four-drawer filing cabinets. The UK government
department holds some 11million records, which includes paper and parchment records, electronic records and websites, photographs, posters and drawings, plus an estimated 6million maps, the new tape system will allow it to handle a “flood” of official digital records over the coming years.
“We stick with LTO drives because we
know there is always a certain level of
investment protection. This is the case
with the LTO-4 drive, as it provides read
support with the older LTO-2 cartridges.”
- US based construction companyLTO-3 to LTO-5 upgrade
opportunity
History would suggest that the majority of LTO Ultrium tape drive customers will skip a generation before taking advantage of the two-generation backward compatibility to upgrade their performance and capacity. In the past, LTO-1 customers upgraded to LTO-3, while it was predominantly LTO-2 customers upgrading to LTO-4. It would therefore follow, that LTO-3 customers will be the predominant generation upgrading to LTO-5.
According to IDC, there is an installed base of over 570,000 LTO-3 Tape Drives, many of which may now be out of warranty, and/or coming to an end of their service contracts. Added together, these factors create an exciting opportunity for OEMs to target the LTO-3 installed base, especially given the following compelling reasons to upgrade to LTO-5:
According to IDC, there
is an installed base of
over 570,000 LTO-3 Tape
Drives, many of which may
now be out of warranty,
and/or coming to an end of
their service contracts.
Current IT issue Benefit of upgrading from LTO-3 to LTO-5
Keeping pace with data growth Offering more than 3x the capacity (3TB v 800GB compressed) - a single
LTO-5 drive can do the work of three LTO-3 drives.
Furthermore, as data volumes grow, scalability of storage becomes an important factor. How much does it cost to expand a storage system, will it add to management overheads and complexity? LTO-5 Tape drives and media are easily scalable, with solutions such as LTO-5 Tape Libraries offering infinitely scalable capacities; just add in another tape cartridge within a library. Complexity of managing multiple
devices and pieces of media
Lower resource/maintenance requirements - jumping from LTO-3 to LTO-5 will reduce the number of drives and media needed for performing backups, while still meeting service levels. Consolidating decreases the number of tape drives and the associated management and maintenance expense per drive.
Expanding media library Reduce the media library - by moving from LTO-3 to LTO-5 media, customers
can reduce their media library by 75% to store the same capacity - LTO-5 cartridges store almost 4x more capacity per cartridge.
Shrinking backup windows Spend less time on backup - LTO-5 provides more than double the
performance of LTO-3 half-high drives, with LTO-3 full-high drive customers gaining 75% more performance with LTO-5.
Increasing data security risks Unlike LTO-3, the LTO-5 drive features hardware based data encryption
as standard, providing added levels of security for data at rest without any additional costs.
Budget constraints Superior TCO – for example, when comparing an LTO-3 HH SAS external
tape drive with 1 cartridge to an LTO-5 HH SAS external tape drive with 1 cartridge, you get around a 50% reduction in cost per GB with the LTO-5 solution, ( based on current LTO-3 street pricing and estimated LTO-5 street pricing) and around a 25% reduction in $/MBs performance (based on current LTO-3 street pricing and estimated LTO-5 street pricing). Pressure to reduce energy
consumption
Superior energy efficiency/GB costs - consolidating to fewer, more energy-efficient LTO-5 drives, reduces the rising power and cooling costs; this reduction in power and cooling demand can also impact the physical operations of the data center, reducing systems downtime and limiting the risk of potential data center outages.
Clearly there is a strong case – with both financial and operational benefits - for customers to upgrade from LTO-3 to LTO-5 technology. Furthermore, this can be done quickly and easily as wide operating system and software application support exists for both generations.
LTO-5 provides the installed base with the ability to store more than three times the capacity of LTO-3 in the same footprint, while lowering TCO, enhancing data security and helping to consolidate data protection for easier process management.