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StorageTek's vision of the future

From STORAGE Magazine Vol 4 No 02 - April 2004

Todd Rief, StorageTek's Director of Operational Strategy, considers the way ahead for the storage market in general - and StorageTek in particular.

Collectively the global business market is wasting over $10 billion a year on wasted disk storage; "The $25 billion performance disk market is ripe for disruption by ILM (Information Life Cycle Management). Some 20-30 percent of it in the field is un-partitioned. Another 20-30 percent of it is partitioned but under-utilised," says Todd Rief, StorageTek's Director of Operational Strategy.

What ILM does is enable you to store data on the most cost-efficient media consonant with performance requirements. Not everything needs to reside on the highly expensive and high-speed spinning platters of Shark and Symmetrix disk arrays.
StorageTek can afford to point this out because, as Rief admits, "We don't have a big legacy in the $25 billion performance disk tier." StorageTek has probably the most integrated set of tiered storage media, from performance disk, inline and nearline storage through to archival libraries.

Library Moves
StorageTek recently introduced a new top-end library, the StreamLine SL8500. Rief says that a mid-market version of the library can be expected with a disk cache integrated within it, based on StorageTek's Indigo technology. This has a set of serial ATA (SATA) disk drives plus tape virtualisation software.

Backup software such as Veritas' Backup Exec thinks it is writing backup sets to an LTO 2 tape library, when in fact it is being written to a virtual LTO2 tape device spinning around on a serial ATA drive array. The write speed is many times faster to disk, meaning that the time to move the backup set off the source disk onto the (virtual) tape is slashed. What took many hours before will take just half an hour with the new library. Naturally the backup set on the SATA drives can then be written to actual tapes in the library at comparative leisure without impacting production system performance.

Restoration from the disk cache is pretty near instant. Supported tape formats include LTO 2, StorageTek's 9840 and 9940 and SDLT. There are no plans to support Sony's SAIT format.

New Tape
Rief says, "We will be refreshing the 9840 line in mid-2005 and we will leapfrog LTO2 with higher performance and a longer duty cycle. A StorageTek next-generation tape will be faster and hold more. It will be at the terabyte level. There will be 1TB native in generation two of this drive with 500GB native in the first generation."

Will tape still be needed with the sudden proliferation of fixed content disk arrays and disk-based backup products? Rief says, "There's going to be hundreds of Terabytes of compliance data a year. Do you really want that on disk?" Tape-based archives use less floor space and less expensive media. It seems highly unlikely to StorageTek that they will be swept away by disk-based alternatives.

ILM Partners
StorageTek is partnering with software suppliers who will provide the application-level intelligence to use an ILM infrastructure. An email archive product is available from StorageTek's partner IXOS. Rief says, "We'll partner with application players above us in the stack, just like we did in the ERP market. Email is the poster-child for getting ILM right, a perfect application for this."

Rief mentioned forthcoming products such as a Life Cycle Director for DB2, which will look at tables and move hotspots. StorageTek thinks Content-Addressed Storage (CAS) is an interesting technology for archives, in Rief's view, and, "CAS might be a way to do that. I wouldn't be surprised. You could put CAS into tape with virtualisation disk code." The picture being drawn here is of a supplier strengthening its hardware and software. Simply put, the company is about storage technology, very good storage technology. ST
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