data protection for the mid-market: tape for affordability

Data Protection for the Mid‐Market

Tape for Affordability, Scalability—and Disaster Recovery

March 2013

Data Protection for the Mid‐Market 2

Contents

Abstract ............................................................................................................... 3

Introduction ........................................................................................................ 4

First Things First: Disaster Recovery (DR) .............................................................. 5

Defining the Mid‐Market: Size .............................................................................. 5

Scalability ............................................................................................................ 7

Defining the Mid‐Market: Data Quantity and IT Infrastructure .............................. 8

Tape Streamlines IT Resources ........................................................................................................ 9

Tape Library: T50e Ease of Use and Maintenance ....................................................................... 10

Conclusion ......................................................................................................... 11

Additional References ........................................................................................ 12

Copyright ©2015 Spectra Logic Corporation. BlueScale, Spectra, SpectraGuard, Spectra Logic, TeraPack, TFinity, and TranScale are registered trademarks of Spectra Logic Corporation. ArchiveGrade, BlackPearl, IntraCloud, and nTier Verde are trademarks of Spectra Logic Corporation. All rights reserved worldwide. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners. All library features and specifications listed in this white paper are subject to change at any time without notice.


AB S T R A CT

As data grows by a factor of ten every five years,1 so too does its importance. Data growth affects all sizes of businesses and organizations, although enterprise organizations get perhaps the most attention. This share of attention is likely because the quantities of data in enterprise organizations are so much greater than in smaller organizations. Increasing from 100 TB to 1 PB is much more dramatic than the increase from 1 TB to 100 TB—yet both are growth rates by factor of ten.

At the same time data is growing, issues like disaster recovery and legal compliance make data retention necessary for mid‐size organizations. The failure to assure against these risks can be extremely costly, especially for a middle‐market company without the resources or staff to devote to a major natural (or legal) disaster.

Identifying the right tools for data protection is extremely important to the success and continuity of middle‐sized organizations. These tools need to be integrated without requiring an expensive and disruptive overhaul of existing IT infrastructure, and without adding to or demanding more of IT staff. One key to this is to build on existing data storage and protection equipment. Tape is the best option when expanding on existing processes, because tape is a medium that is affordable and scales easily, in increments as small as one tape at a time, to keep up with steep growth of data.

Figure 1: 15 years of growth

1 Data, data Everywhere.” The Economist. 25 February 2010.: http://www.economist.com/

node/15557443


INT RO D UC T IO N

Estimates gauge middle market company revenues as accounting for 68% of the

United States’ GNP. 2 Yet the mid‐ market is harder to define than smallest (e.g., 1

employee) and largest (e.g., 100,000 employees), because there are no hard edges to it. Typical metrics for defining mid‐market includes:

Number of employees and total revenue

The amount of data an organization manages

An organization’s IT structure

Figure 2: Mid-market organization GNP contributions

Data protection requirements shift according to the given definition of the mid‐market. The primary data protection mechanisms widely in place include tape, and possibly disk. Even the cloud—which is also referred to as a data protection option—has to rely on tape or disk or both. In assessing data protection requirements, the first consideration for every organization, regardless of its classification or size, is recovery from disaster. And for that, tape is the best choice.

2 Various. “Definition of Mid‐Market?” Wall Street Oasis. 3 August 2009. http://www.wallstreetoasis.

com/forums/definition‐of‐mid‐market


F I R S T THI NG S F I R S T : D I SA S T E R

RE C O V ER Y (DR)

Data protection is a requirement for all organizations to ensure continuity following a disaster. The necessity for DR is shown in research; for example, reports indicate that 50% of companies with no DR plan, who lost their data during a tornado, never re‐opened following the disaster. 3 Secure data is one of the best insurance policies a company can take out for its success.

Data protection requirements are further necessary to comply with regulated and long periods of data retention. For example, laws about data storage and privacy apply to the vertical markets of the medical industry. HIPAA requires medical companies to store patient’s medical records for five to seven years, and to store their childhood records for the life of the patient. This data also has to be highly secure and easily accessible to address patient care and also for legal reasons, such as a mishap in the office. Laws exist like this in many other industries as well, and a company is advised to research legal strictures on data protection. If there is a law requiring compliance, companies must often store more data for a longer period of time, necessitating secure, cost‐effective storage.

These requirements build a basis for using tape for data protection in the mid‐market, in part because of the high likelihood that organizations already use some form of tape in their IT set‐ups. “Tape continues to be the preferred home for nearly 70 percent of the world's data,”4 according to Jon Toigo, industry analyst. Using tape for DR automatically builds on existing infrastructure and practices, and provides cost‐effective long‐term storage that addresses DR and legal compliance.

DE F IN I NG T HE M I D ‐MAR KE T : S I Z E

Organizations can be objectively assessed simply by comparing the number of employees and the as 15,0005 (not included in the graph) to 250 employees.6

3 Maltby, Emily. “Readying for the Worst.” The organization’s total revenue/budget. The European

Union defines a middle market company as having 50 with between 100 and 999 employees as mid‐sized, with 500‐9997 as “large mid‐market.” Some even put the upper limit as high Wall Street Journal. 9 September 2009. 4 Toigo, Jon. “Getting it on Tape,” ESJ.com, 7/21/2009. www.esj.com/2009/07/21/getting‐it‐on‐

tape.aspx 5 Rosenthal, Beth Ellyn. “The New Focus on the Mid‐Market: Why Buyers and Suppliers are Excited

about the NewPossibilities.” Outsourcing Center.com. 1 November 2008. http://www.outsourcing‐center.com/2008‐11‐the‐new‐ focus‐on‐the‐midmarket‐why‐buyers‐and‐suppliers‐are‐excited‐about‐the‐new‐possibilities‐article‐37359.html 6 “Enterprise Size.” Office for National Statistics. European Union. 10 September 2008.

http://www.ons. gov.uk/about‐statistics/user‐guidance/lm‐guide/concepts/employers/enterprise/index.html


Other experts define a midmarket company by revenue, again with wide span. Revenues for mid‐ market organizations can be defined as ranging from:

$50 million to $500 million7

$25 million to $1 billion8

$1.5 million to $2 billion9 ‐‐a sizeable spread.

Figure 3: Employees for mid-market organizations

Figure 4: Mid-market by revenue

When interpreting this spread in the context of data protection requirements, it is evident that scalability is extremely important. A scalable data solution can address the needs of a wide cross‐section of organizations included in any definition of the mid‐market, and equips an expanding company to handle continued data growth without excessive cost.

7 Baker, Andrew. “Focus.Com Q&A,” Director, Service Operations, SWN Communications Inc., August

26, 2010. http://www.focus.com/questions/information‐technology/how‐do‐you‐properly‐define‐mid‐market‐segment‐ businesses/ 8 The Economist Intelligence Unit, "Perspectives from America's economic engine: US middle market

outlook 2007," July 2007. 9 Myron, David. “Who’s Minding the Mid‐Market?” DestinationCRM.com, CRM Magazine. March 2003.

http://www.destinationcrm.com/Articles/Editorial/Magazine‐Features/Whos‐Minding‐the‐Mid‐Market‐45053.aspx


SC AL A BI L I T Y

Tape libraries are scalable to an extreme, making them a logical choice for the mid‐market. Unlike disk, which requires a large investment once its fixed capacity is maximized, tape can be added in small quantities, increasing over time by small increments without ever mandating an upgrade unless storage requirements change or throughput doesn’t meet a backup window. Even then, some libraries can be scaled with minimal disruption to address changed requirements.

Automated tape is the best choice for the mid‐market. With automated tape libraries, backup jobs can be schedule to run automatically, significantly reducing the IT time required for firms using a stand‐ alone tape drive. Single tape drives must be manually loaded and unloaded to handle backups; autoloaders are another category of automation that is incompletely automated. Fully automated tape requires a library. Libraries include robots, and preferably an option for multiple drives and multiple slots for many tapes, so that tapes can be written to or read from automatically.

Tape libraries are well‐suited to handle data growth, and the best libraries support an option that lets organizations increase capacity only as needed. Tape libraries such as Spectra’s T50e Capacity on Demand feature permits slot increases of as little as 5 slots at a time. This fits well within revenue/budgetary considerations for IT investment. Second, a single library can be used to manage many tapes, even beyond the library’s slot count. Tapes can be added beyond the library’s full slot count by moving tapes out of the library when it is full, and adding new tapes as needed, and by re‐using existing tapes when the data is no longer needed. For example, a 50 slot T50e can write data beyond the 50 tapes that can be stored in a single library. Disk does not have this option—once the disk is full, an entirely new capital investment is necessary to expand disk. Drives can also be added to the T50e libraries as needed. This increases throughput, letting organizations back up more data more quickly.

If an organization does move beyond the capacity of a T50e library, note that Spectra Logic makes it possible to scale up to the next model with minimal disruption while letting the customer retain the value of the T50e library. Further, all Spectra Libraries are managed with a common software interface and operating system greatly reducing time otherwise required to learn the use and management of a new library.


DE F IN I NG T HE M I D ‐MAR KE T : DAT A

QU A NT IT Y AND IT IN F R A ST R U CT U R E

Another set of definitions describe the mid‐market based on the amount of data the organization must manage, and the resources available to IT to manage that data. Again the definitions span a large range. In terms of amount of data to manage, one definition estimates that midrange companies need to store anywhere from 1 TB10

up to 60 TB, an average of 30 TB of data,11 and another study estimates middle‐market data as spanning the range between 10 and 50 TB.12

Figure 5: Data for mid-market organizations

Beyond data quantity, another definition of a middle market company is based on a smaller, less formal IT infrastructure. This suggests that a company’s structure is more indicative of its role in the market than size or financial standing. The online dictionary of financial terms assumes that the less formal IT structure is a key identifier of middle market companies. 13 One expert in IT management argues that a business with 8000 employees and a highly developed IT management structure would qualify as enterprise, while one with 10,000 employees with less formal IT organization is a middle market company. 14

10

Wendt, Jerome M. “The 20 Billion Dollar Midmarket Deduplication Opportunity,” DCIG, June 2009, www.dciginc.com/2009/06/the‐20‐billion‐dollar‐midmarket‐deduplication.html 11

Wendt, Jerome M. 2010 DCIG Mid‐market Storage Array Buyer’s Guide: The Insider’s Guide to Evaluating FC and iSCSI Midrange Arrays. 12

Geist, Joshua. Navigating the Digital Haystack. Geminare Blog, August 16, 2010, referencing ESG study: http://www.geminare.com/Blog/navigating_the_digital_haystack. 13

“Definition of Middle Market.” Business Dictionary.com. 2010. http://www.businessdictionary.com/ 14

Voskiul, Jol. “Mid‐Market Deadlocks for PLM.” Online Forum. 17 May 2010. http://virtualdutchman.com/ 2010/05/17/mid‐market‐deadlocks‐for‐plm/


Industry players follow this analysis, too. Microsoft tracks number of computers relative to number of employees to identify the middle market.15

T A P E S T R E A M L I N E S IT R E S O U R C E S A middle market storage system must accommodate the small yet busy and likely overworked IT departments. Tape as a tool in the data protection strategy builds on a technology that is in most cases already in use. With automation, tape provides a tool that is easy to implement and use, reliable, and secure. For the smallest departments, relying on tape alone makes sense economically and in terms of ease of management. Adding disk as an intermediary step may also boost performance while addressing any severe backup window limitations.

Although disk‐only vendors push a message that disk is easier to manage than tape, data shows otherwise. It turns out that it takes more time to manage data16 stored on non‐mainframe disk compared to the time it takes to manage data stored on tape. This data objectively supports the claim that tape is less staff‐intensive than disk, assuming that a site uses both contemporary backup software and tape technology.

As to reliability and security, tape again has an advantage. Disk’s reputation for reliability has suffered in the past decade. Research at Carnegie Mellon17 showed that, “for drives less than five years old, field replacement rates were larger than […] datasheet MTTF … by a factor of 2–10.” Robin Harris, an analyst at Data Mobility

Group20 suggests that after about three years, IT staff at disk farms “should be thinking about replacing your drives." The 3 years mark represents a relative lifespan that may vary depending on a number of factors, including the value of the data and the quality of backups.

This means that data on disks is more vulnerable than data on tape, given that contemporary tape technologies, such as LTO, can store data securely for 30 years and more, assuming that tape is written to according to manufacturer’s warranty for

the rated usage (in the case of LTO‐5, this is 250,00021 power‐on hours).

Data protected on disk‐only is further vulnerable to the network environment in a way that tape isn’t, simply because disk is online—hot. Disgruntled employees, viruses and malware, catastrophic disk failure such as array controller crashes, and natural disasters all can bring down a disk and make the data inaccessible. This includes mirrored data (data copied to an alternate set of disk) and RAID’d disk.

15

Doyle, T.C, and Wolfe, Alexander. “Midmarket Perplexities: Exactly What Is A Midmarket Company?” CRN. 9 September 2004. http://www.crn.com/news/channel‐programs/47101984/midmarket‐perplexities‐exactly‐what‐is‐a‐midmarket‐company.htm;jsessionid=2Gr3rXO‐csXJOOZXwUzaxg**.ecappj02 16

Moore, Fred. “Tape Technology Leaps Forward in the Third Era,” White Paper for Oracle, June 2010. 17

Schroeder, Bianca and Garth A. Gibson, “Disk failures in the real world,” Proceedings, FAST ’07: 5th USENIX Conference on File and USENIX Association Storage Technologies, Computer Science Department, Carnegie Mellon University, 2007.


T A P E L I B R A R Y : T50 E E A S E O F U S E A N D

M A I N T E N A N C E Mid‐size libraries such as Spectra’s T50e and T120 are the simplest to manage of any libraries on the market. These libraries help IT staff secure long‐term data with minimal strain, freeing staff to continue with the on‐going systems, network, and database support that keeps the information side of the business going.

Figure 6: T50e single interface

The Spectra T50e’s single interface provides an ease of management that is ideal for a busy middle market IT team. The library interface is accessible both on the front panel color touch‐screen and remotely through a web browser, optionally secured using SSL. This is ideal for the middle market company who needs flexibility and efficiency in managing IT resources. The graphical interface provides simple access to all functions through icons, and a wizard‐based guided configuration. With this interface, the learning curve is minimal, reducing the complexity of the multiple independent interfaces IT managers are otherwise required to use.

Spectra’s optional Assisted Self‐Maintenance program, again unique, allows you to streamline repair and minimize downtime by keeping parts on‐site. With this option, customer staff can readily replace components when issues arise and as directed by technical support. Instead of waiting four or eight hours for an engineer to arrive at the site, administrative staffcan quickly install the component, and get issues resolved very quickly. Another feature of the T50e is the global spare drive option, along with remote fail‐over. These features are only available in the T50e compared to similarly sized libraries. These greatly eliminate effort when using a T50e at a remote site, or when the library is otherwise physically unattended, such as at night.

The T50e also includes an encryption and key management option at no extra charge, so that encryption can be added at any point. This feature is increasingly important as regulation concerning personal data and other factors expands.


Table 1: Industry Comparison: Mid‐Range Libraries

Feature Spectra Logic T50e Quantum i40/i80

Qualstar RLS 8404 HP MSL Series

Max Slots, Max Capacity

10 ‐ 50 slots; 125TB 25/50 ‐ 40/80 slots; 100/200 TB

44 slots; 66 TB LTO‐5 only

48 48 Slots; 120 TB

Capacity On Demand

5 Slots 15 – 30 slots, one time upgrade only

8 slots No

Common interface across family of libraries— ease of use

All Spectra Tape Series libraries share a common interface, simplifying learning and use for years to come. Observatory allows management of multiple libraries from a single interface

No No No

Color Touch‐ Screen Interface

Yes No; monochrome; must use physical buttons (below screen) to navigate

No: monochrome, text‐ based; must use physical buttons to navigate

No: monochrome touch‐ screen/text‐ based

Assisted Self Maintenance (on‐site parts customer can install)

Yes No No No

CO NC L U S IO N

Regardless of the size of an organization, data handling and storage has emerged as

one of the key business strategies and mandates in the new decade.22 This is perhaps as important for middle market companies as it is for the big data enterprise organizations. Issues like business continuance and disaster recovery plans are essential foundations for any successful organization. Building on existing IT infrastructure, tape makes data protection straightforward and cost‐effective even in the face of steep data growth.


AD D IT IO NA L RE F E R E NC E S

Church, Zach. “Data deduplication making disk backup more realistic for midmarket.” SearchCIO‐Midmarket.com, 23 July 2008.

Jelitto, Jens, Mark Lantz et al. “Magnetic tape storage advances and the growth of archival data,” Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Standards and Technologies in Multimedia Archives and Records (STAR), Lausanne, 2010. http://mmspl.epfl.ch/webdav/site/mmspl/shared/star2010/ppt/star2010_jelitto.pdf

Moore, Richard L. “Disk and Tape Storage Cost Models.” San Diego SuperComputer Center. San Diego, CA. Available through http://chronopolis.sdsc.edu/assets/docs/dt_cost.pdf.

Brandel, Mary. “Vendors; Hard Drive Failure Rates: Myth or Metric?,” www.computerworlduk.com/in‐ depth/infrasturcture/1298/vendors‐hard‐drive‐failures‐rates ‐my‐or‐metric/

IBM specifications, http://www‐03.ibm.com/systems/storage/tape/oem/t800f/specifications.html

http://mmspl.epfl.ch/webdav/site/mmspl/shared/star2010/ppt/star2010_jelitto.pdf

http://chronopolis.sdsc.edu/assets/docs/dt_cost.pdf

http://www.computerworlduk.com/in

http://www/

303-449-6400 • 800-833-1132 • (Fax) 303-939-8844 • 6285 Lookout Road • Boulder, CO 80301 USA • spectralogic.com

Deep Storage Experts

Spectra Logic develops deep storage solutions that solve the

problem of long term storage for business and technology

professionals dealing with exponential data growth.

Dedicated solely to storage innovation for more than 35

years, Spectra Logic’s uncompromising product and

customer focus is proven by the largest information users in

multiple vertical markets globally.

Spectra enables affordable, multi‐decade data storage and

access by creating new methods of managing information in

all forms of deep storage—including archive, backup, cold

storage, cloud, and private cloud.

For more information, please visit

http://www.spectralogic.com.

http://www.spectralogic.com/

data protection for the mid-market: tape for affordability

Documents