FUJIFILM INSIGHTS BLOG

By Rich Gadomski

March 19, 2020

As LTO-8 drives and media are increasingly deployed and widely available, the value proposition of LTO-8 is being confirmed by customers and it’s a pretty impressive story.

In the case of a major high-performance computing (HPC) customer who had been using LTO-6 previously for their archive, the jump to LTO-8 has done wonders for their available capacity. With approximately 7,000 slots in their library, fully loaded with LTO-6 media at 2.5TB each yielded a total native storage capacity of 17.5 PB. Migrating to LTO-8 drives and eventually converting those slots to LTO-8 media at 12.0 TB gives them up to a massive 84 PBs, almost a 5X increase. That’s lots of room to scale as needed!

Performance also gets a big boost as LTO-6 drives are rated at 160 MB per second transfer rate compared to LTO-8 drives at 360 MB per second. This means fewer drives are required to meet the same performance objectives. As a result, TCO also gets a major boost as fewer drives, fewer pieces of media and no additional floor space or library frames are required to manage the same amount of data.

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Migrating from one generation to another generation of tape technology may seem like a difficult task. In practice, though, tape migration is relatively straightforward and provides tremendous ROI thanks to each generation’s increase in performance and capacity.

In this video, George Crump of Storage Switzerland talks to Alan Hall of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration about the advantages of migrating to tape.

When it comes to data storage spending, knowing your total cost of ownership (TCO) is key. In this video, George Crump, lead analyst at Storage Switzerland talks with Brad Johns of Brad Johns Consulting about the key factors to consider when it comes to TCO. This includes CapEx costs such as hardware and license fees; OpEx costs such as energy, network costs, staff needed to manage the storage; and technology upgrades/new equipment over time. They also discuss how to use a free TCO Calculator to calculate 5- and 10-year scenarios for the Total Cost of Ownership when using automated tape storage, disk-based and cloud-based archive storage.

View the full video and access the free TCO Calculator here: https://datastorage-na.fujifilm.com/tco-tool/

IT organizations hate licensing software based on capacity. They despise it with a passion for the simple reason that data is growing exponentially, a fact over which they often have little or no control. What rankles them is software licensing that continuously increases in price as the amount of stored data grows. Customers are already paying for the actual storage devices to house the data. But capacity-based software metering means they have to pay for it over again and again and again. It has become common for software licensing to cost more than the actual storage many times over. That doesn’t strike most people as a fair bargain. The software is not working any harder, but the price goes up like clockwork every month or year depending on the subscription frequency and data growth. It’s maddening to the extreme, and IT departments are screaming that it’s unsustainable.

For more information on this topic, check out this white paper: The Atrociously Unfair Data Capacity Tax.

By Peter Faulhaber

Last year was full of key milestones for the tape storage industry. The cost per terabyte and total cost of ownership (TCO) improved for tape-based storage and archive; tape became firmly entrenched in all of the major U.S. hyperscale data centers; and the tape “air gap” continued to be a compelling tool in combating cybercrime.

As we begin 2020, we expect even further momentum and demand for tape storage as data growth continues on an explosive path and new storage architectures and emerging technologies place increased demands on the need for more effective data management.

Here are a few of my predictions for the storage market in 2020:

• Software-defined tape for object storage will emerge as a popular solution, providing the interface to download data from object storage systems to compatible tape systems using standard S3 APIs. Users will be able to write objects directly to tape in native form, in a self-describing, open format.  As a result, object storage users can leverage the value proposition of tape including lowest TCO, reliability and long term archivability.

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