Two Big Names for Spectra Logic

Tape is not dead but now essentially to be acquired only for massive archiving in big libraries.

In tape robotics, there are now just a few number of actors: HP, IBM, Oracle/StorageTek, Overland Storage, Qualstar, Quantum, Spectra Logic, all of them based in USA, and Tandberg Data in Europe.

IBM and Oracle/StorageTek are mainly successful in mainframe environment with proprietary tape cartridges, but also have robotics for LTO.

The other ones have products for open systems with LTO.

The HP ESL G3 library scale up to over 7104 cartridges, Overland NEO 8000e to 1,000 and Quantum Scalar i6000n to 7,224, but are not really strong in the high end archiving market.

Tandberg is not there, culminating at 188 slots.

Qualstar has big libraries but is in bad shape and remains a small company. Its tape robotic segment revenues were only $1.7 million for its fourth quarter ended June 2012, compared to $2.0 million for the same period last year, a decrease of 14.4%.

Quantum is in trouble with its tape activity. Its CFO Linda Breard, CFO, commented the financial quarter ended September 2012 of its company with the following words: "The primary driver of the year-over-year decline was in branded and OEM tape automation revenue, which was down $13.6 million. Devices and media revenue also declined $5.8 million."

One of the good reason of this decline is the fact that Quantum, being for many years a reseller partner of EMC – that never entered in the tape market -, lost it last March and was replaced by Spectra Logic. The information was confirmed to StorageNewsLetter at the recent SNW Europe by Molly Rector, Spectra Logic’s chief marketing officer, EVP product management and WW marketing.

33-year old Spectra Logic is the only firm in the world entirely dedicated to tape libraries with its own robotics – integrating IBM LTO drives. Its high end T-Finity can hold up to 50,100 LTO cartridge slots in a single library frame-based architecture to reach 3.2EB with the coming LTO-6.

It’s pretty sure that he company got recently a huge customer, Amazon, for its new online archiving offering, Glacier. Rector didn’t want to confirm the information but didn’t say it was not true. Often end users don’t want to publicly reveal the name of their vendors and maybe Amazon prefers not to disclose that Glacier uses slow and mechanical stuffs to access data.

But the information was confirmed by several other sources (The Register, Extremetech). storageservers wrote: "Contrary to the previous idea that Amazon Glacier cloud archival storage offers disk-based data storage, the latest word from a reliable source reveals that it uses LTO-6. This was leaked out by a reliable senior source of Amazon, at the recently held IP Expo. There is news that Amazon uses LTO-6 from either IBM, Oracle or Spectra Logic."

The only doubt we could have concerning the deal is originated from a sentence written by the same Spectra Logic’s Rector last September:" In summary, Amazon Glacier is not practical for the active archive markets that tape has enjoyed rapidly growing footprint in. Bandwidth costs are too high, retrieval is too slow and frequency of data access does not fit the Glacier model."

But the use of tape by Amazon
can be confirmed by two points:

• It’s probably the cheapest online data service in the world. For example price is $0.050/GB for 500TB/month in USA East (price is higher in other regions). Why such a ridiculous amount? For storing huge amount of data, tape is cheaper than HDDs. The high value of the robotic and the drives is compensated by the lower price/GB of tapes in a massive storage configuration. It does not mean that Glacier is not using HDDs at all, but probably only as a cache for the libraries.
• "Retrieval jobs typically complete within 3-5 hours," stated Amazon on Glacier. This huge amount of time can be explained by the use of tape libraries where access time is in minutes in the better cases. If Glacier has to send data being on the same cartridge at different users, it can be longer. And if there is a lot of activity, all the drives can be in use at the same time, then the customer being obliged to wait much more.

Spectra Logic did a recent agreement with Bridgeworks to get a bridge to connect libraries, up to now with 4Gb and 8Gb FC only, to 10GBE and consequently iSCSI. Also for Glacier?