Record 5TB for Tape by Oracle/StorageTek and Fujifilm

Oracle announced the StorageTek T10000C tape drive, which provides the highest performance, lowest total cost of ownership at one-third to one-fifth the floor space of any tiered storage, archive or backup solution.

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Oracle’s StorageTek tiered storage solutions incorporate the advantages of both disk and tape, and deliver a scalable, cost efficient and energy-efficient storage solution for heterogeneous data protection, consolidation, archiving and cloud environments.

The StorageTek T10000C is the industry’s fastest and highest capacity tape drive with a 5TB native capacity and 240MB/second native throughput – more than 3x the capacity, and 50 to 70 percent faster than any other tape drive, including LTO-5 and the IBM TS1130.

Compared to disk-only solutions from EMC, Oracle’s StorageTek solution scales to 30x the capacity, and 50x the performance, while requiring 99 percent less power and cooling.

The capacity and throughput increase helps customers reduce the cost of enterprise storage, while providing the fastest backup and archive solutions.

Oracle’s StorageTek tape storage solutions are the first to scale to an exabyte (1,000PB, with 2:1 compression) to handle the world’s largest archive and long-term backup requirements.

The solutions include in-line encryption which provides the critical data protection that enterprise customers demand while remaining completely transparent to the application and without any performance degradation.

With the first exabyte capacity tape system, Oracle stores 17x more data in one tape library unit and provides 5x more performance than IBM, and more than 30x the capacity and 50x the performance of EMC’s disk solutions.

Integrated with Oracle Software
for Open Systems and Mainframe Environments

For open systems archives, Oracle’s Sun Storage Archive Manager software provides simple, policy-based management of data across disk and tape tiers.
Paired with the Oracle Exadata Database Machine, the StorageTek T10000C shortens the backup window by 33 percent.
For open systems backup, Oracle’s StorageTek tape drives are qualified with Oracle Secure Backup software, as well as with industry-leading backup software as part of a disk-to-disk-to-tape (D-D-T) architecture.
For mainframe environments, the StorageTek T10000C is fully supported by Oracle’s StorageTek Virtual Storage Manager, which provides the unique capability of policy-based management across Fibre Channel disk, SAS disk, fast access tape, and high capacity tape.
The StorageTek T10000C tape drive extends Oracle’s leadership in providing an integrated data protection solution with Oracle 11g Recovery Manager, Oracle Secure Backup and Oracle’s Sun Storage Archive Manager software running with Oracle Solaris and Oracle Linux, and Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Oracle’s Sun SPARC Enterprise Servers, Oracle’s Sun Fire x86 clustered systems and Oracle’s Sun Storage and Oracle’s StorageTek Tape.
The new tape drive also runs with leading third-party operating systems, open systems storage management products and mainframe storage management software.

“The release of the StorageTek T10000C tape drive reaffirms Oracle’s undisputed leadership in tape technology,” said James Cates, vice president, Hardware Development, Oracle. “The StorageTek T10000C sets the new standard in tape by storing over three times more data on a single cartridge than any other tape drive. Combining it with the StorageTek SL3000 and SL8500 libraries helps ensure that customers, regardless of size, can afford to retain critical data without concern for future scalability.”

“Enterprise customers continue to grapple with unabated data growth, extremely long retention periods, short backup windows, as well as budget and floor space constraints,” said Robert Amatruda, Director, Data Protection and Recovery, IDC. “The StorageTek T10000C tape drive, coupled with the StorageTek SL8500 and SL3000 enterprise libraries, addresses customer requirements for high-capacity and cost-effective tape solutions enabling them greater efficiency for their backup, archive and recovery needs. Additionally, The StorageTek T10000C tape drive demonstrates Oracle’s commitment to future innovations in its tape technology.“

Comments

Since the acquisition of StorageTek by Sun and then Sun by Oracle, this announcement proves for the first time that Oracle is really committed to tape. There was some statements of Oracle's executives on the subject but the company was losing market shares to IBM in mainframe's tape libraries as customers and the storage community were not sure about the Oracle's declarations. High-end tapes, drives and libraries are a stable market but generating high revenues and profits with two big competitors - add also smaller Qualstar and Spectra Logic.
The release is impressive. 5TB native capacity in the new T10000C tape cartridge is a world record, the highest figure for any removable storage media. Oracle was at 1TB for the former T10000B, IBM is currently at the same 1TB capacity into its most recent 3480-type cartridge for TS1130 (not able to read and write Oracle's media). LTO-5 is now at 1.5TB and DAT, with helical scan technology - compared to the other ones using linear serpentine -, is only at 160GB.
These last years, the tape capacity were below the best HDDs. Now disk drives at a maximum 3TB are beaten. And it's always easier to transfer the content of one HDD to only one tape. But we are far from the capacity limit than can be reached into a tape cartridge. The areal density on tape is much lower than on HDD and optical disc and can be largely increased. The LTO consortium expects 3.2TB for next LTO-6 and a last generation at 12.8TB, but we don't know when. 50TB was developed by Hitachi Maxell and the Tokyo Institute of Technology on LTO. IBM Research said in January 2010 that it was working on a 35TB tape cartridge with Fujifilm BaFe medium.
For mainframe cartridges, 5TB is a huge growth, a capacity increased by five in one step. Generally, the capacity of tape is doubling each two to three years. The former T10000B at 1TB was announced in September 2008.
Tpi and bpi of T10000C has not been revealed but the drive uses dual heads providing 32 tracks that write data simultaneously on each pass. It uses a new BaFe base-film with smaller particles. The length of the media is 1,147 meters (917 for T10000A/B), the thickness 5.2 microns (6.5 for T10000A/B) for a slight greater weight of the cartridge, 270 grams (262.5 for T10000A/B).
Formerly Imation was also manufacturing T10000 tape media for Oracle, but there is now no word for the new T0000C on this company that was an historical leader in this profitable market of mainframe's tapes.
For the T10000C drive, the size of the buffer has been pushed to 2GB (256MB for T10000A/B). Read/write speed reaches 5.62 meters/s. But access time (tape lopad and thread to read) continues to be slow: 13.1s (16.5 for T10000A/B) and 57s for average file access (excludes load/thread), 26s for unload time and 115s to rewind the entire tape. Device's volume is largely bigger (5.77x19x16.8 inches) compared to IBM TS1130 drive (3.8x7.8x18.4 inches). Native transfer rate has been doubled at 240MB/s (TS1130 at 160MB/s). StorageTek File Sync Accelerator to write small blocks more efficiently and Tape Application Accelerator to buffer tape marks will not modify drastically the idea that tapes are slow to use. Former T10000A/B cartridges can only be read, not write. The poor access time explains why tapes are disappearing from backup to be exclusively used for archiving, the T10000C tape being offered with a claimed 30 years of life span by Fujifilm - even if it's better to control the tapes each three to five years.
Another huge record is also the possibility now to get a storage subsystem with an incredible one exabyte or 1,000PB capacity (with 2:1 compression) with Oracle StreamLine 8500 library filled with 100,000 cartridges. It's impossible to get this number with HDDs.
Here a good user's example is the CERN that needs massive volume of data. It stores 40PB, expects to add another 25PB of new data each year and is testing the new Oracle StorageTek T10000C tape drive. For these massive requirements, for sure tape is less expansive even if no price has been revealed by Oracle.
IBM has now no more choice than to answer rapidly to Oracle that has high hopes with his new products for IBM mainframes with Ficon, its own Exadata server, and open systems with FC. And Big Blue will do it probably very soon. In the recent history of mainframe tapes, they always react very rapidly to the other one to reassure its customers.