Jay's Blog challenges users to learn about how tape storage, offered by Sun provides Eco-Friendly Enterprise Storage Solutions. He reviews the white paper recently released by Fred Moore, President of Horison, Inc., that provides insight into what has been happening in the tape industry in the past few years.
Jason Ehrhart and Dean Halbeisen's Sun BluePrints On-Line paper entitled, "Sun's Reference Architecture for Next-Generation Data Backup" describes the Sun reference architecture for next-generation data backup using Symantec NetBackup software.
As data volumes grow and budgets continue to shrink, datacenter managers are looking for ways to scale storage infrastructure and reduce operating costs. Sun’s latest tape drive and tape library solutions can help companies grow automated tape environments without disruption, and consolidate mainframe and open system operating environments while minimizing power, floor space, and operating costs. Solutions are available, as the Sun white paper "Consolidate Storage Infrastructure and Create a Greener Datacenter" demonstrates.
Scott Tracy spoke to the June 2008 meeting of FROSUG on OpenSolaris Tape enhancements.
With Scott were Randy Ralphs, who has been working on tapes for almost 30 years and is the primary developer
the Solaris tape drive for many years, and Dan Maslowski, manager in charge of their group.
Scott started by stating that, contrary to popular opinion, tape is not dead and that much of our data is out there, somewhere on tape. Compliance, backup and DR continue to drive the need for tape.
Most developers just expect tape to work. Scott jokes that they only get noticed when stuff does not work.
The Sun StorageTek T10000B FICON Tape Drive with a native capacity of 1TB on existing T10000 media are available for the SL8500, SL3000, and L180/L700/L1400 Tape Libraries. Some new features of the T10000B FICON Tape Drive are:
1TB native capacity, doubled from 500GB, on existing T10000 media.
Supports legacy read of existing T10000-written media.
4Gb/s FICON interfaces.
Ability to re-purpose T10000B drives from FICON to Fibre Channel and from Fibre Channel to FICON.
Encryption-ready and qualified with Sun's KMS 2.0.
Fujifilm's NANOCUBIC Technology has enabled the company to produce media for the Sun StorageTek T10000 Tape Drive that is capable of storing up to three TB of data using industry standard 3:1 compression, reports CNNMoney.com. This product can provide superior levels of enterprise tape storage performance with 120 MB/sec native transfer rate, the report continues.
As tape moves from a pure backup solution to a premier long-term storage technology, it is expanding its role in the overall tiered storage infrastructure. Tape is one of the most economically responsible storage tiers through the lowest cost per GB, low power and cooling costs during operation and no energy consumed and zero heat generated when at rest.
Sun has announced the Sun StorageTek LT04 mid-range tape drive conversions for the Sun StorageTek SL500 tape library with a general availability date of August 5, 2008. When customers upgrade or consolidate their existing Sun StorageTek tape library, the LTO drive conversions allow them to preserve the investment in LTO drives by facilitating drive redeployment in the new library.
Virtual tape library (VTL) technology is the way to introduce disk into a tape based backup infrastructure. A VTL is a set of disks that emulate tape. Rather than a disk array, the backup software sees a tape drive or a tape library. Tape virtualization is used to improve backup performance and reliability while keeping existing tape infrastructure in operation. There are different solutions for different environments.
Sun has made available an eleven page paper by Fred Moore, President of Horison, Inc, entitled "Tape: The Digital Curator of the Information Age." In the paper, he claims that tape is far from extinct and he explains that tape's role is expanding. Tape drives are now being considered premier long-term storage technology, rather than a pure backup solution.
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