Ultrium Tape Drive Makers Ready LTO 6 Units

July 16, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The Linear Tape Out (LTO) Consortium managed by IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Quantum started selling LTO 6 licenses last June, and now the first tape drives based on the spec are about to hit the market.

According to a statement put out by the consortium, the first LTO 6 drives will hit the market in August, with the ability to store up to 6.25 TB of compressed data on a cartridge, double of the LTO 5 cartridge, with data transfer rates of up to 400 MB/sec on compressed data, a 42.9 per cent boost over LTO 5. If you want the uncompressed capacity and transfer rates for LTO 6 units, divide by two since the benchmarks assume 2:1 data compression (although depending on the nature of your data, you may do better or worse than this).

In the past 12 years, more than 4 million LTO drives have shipped worldwide. Back in 2008, there were 2.5 million units in the field, so the rate of installation is actually accelerating in recent years–something you wouldn’t expect with so-called antiquated tape technology. By the end of the second quarter, storage industry watcher Santa Clara Consulting Group is projecting that over 200 million LTO cartridges of various capacities would have been sold worldwide, with a total of 80 exabytes of data capacity–that’s 80,000 petabytes, or 80 million terabytes–all told. By the way, that is 100 million cartridges sold in the past four years, which is double the rate of sales in the prior eight years. And considering that cartridges are getting fatter and fatter, that is an explosive amount of data growth on tape.

Just as a reminder, back in 2008, the LTO 6 spec called for tapes with 6.4 TB of capacity and a data rate of 540 MB/sec. The LTO partners missed the capacity by a tiny bit and the data transfer rate by a larger margin. But, it is hard to project where a technology will be in any storage method. That’s pretty good, all things considered, and speed ups for CPU cores, memory chips, and disk drives have all but stopped, and tape is starting to slow down now, too. Moore’s Law doesn’t really fix speed problems any more, just capacity. And it is a big problem in all aspects of the IT racket.

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Do the Math When Looking at IBM i Hosting for Cost Savings

COVID-19 has accelerated certain business trends that were already gaining strength prior to the start of the pandemic. E-commerce, telehealth, and video conferencing are some of the most obvious examples. One example that may not be as obvious to the general public but has a profound impact on business is the shift in strategy of IBM i infrastructure from traditional, on-premises environments to some form of remote configuration. These remote configurations and all of their variations are broadly referred to in the community as IBM i hosting.

“Hosting” in this context can mean different things to different people, and in general, hosting refers to one of two scenarios. In the first scenario, hosting can refer to a client owned machine that is housed in a co-location facility (commonly called a co-lo for short) where the data center provides traditional system administrator services, relieving the client of administrative and operational responsibilities. In the second scenario, hosting can refer to an MSP owned machine in which partition resources are provided to the client in an on-demand capacity. This scenario allows the client to completely outsource all aspects of Power Systems hardware and the IBM i operating system and database.

The scenario that is best for each business depends on a number of factors and is largely up for debate. In most cases, pursuing hosting purely as a cost saving strategy is a dead end. Furthermore, when you consider all of the costs associated with maintaining and IBM i environment, it is typically not a cost-effective option for the small to midsize market. The most cost-effective approach for these organizations is often a combination of a client owned and maintained system (either on-prem or in a co-lo) with cloud backup and disaster-recovery-as-a-service. Only in some cases of larger enterprise companies can a hosting strategy start to become a potentially cost-effective option.

However, cost savings is just one part of the story. As IBM i expertise becomes scarce and IT resources run tight, the only option for some firms may be to pursue hosting in some capacity. Whatever the driving force for pursing hosting may be, the key point is that it is not just simply an option for running your workload in a different location. There are many details to consider and it is to the best interest of the client to work with an experienced MSP in weighing the benefits and drawbacks of each option. As COVID-19 rolls on, time will tell if IBM i hosting strategies will follow the other strong business trends of the pandemic.

When we say do the math in the title above, it literally means that you need to do the math for your particular scenario. It is not about us doing the math for you, making a case for either staying on premises or for moving to the cloud. There is not one answer, but just different levels of cost to be reckoned which yield different answers. Most IBM i shops have fairly static workloads, at least measured against the larger mix of stuff on the public clouds of the world. How do you measure the value of controlling your own IT fate? That will only be fully recognized at the moment when it is sorely missed the most.

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Article featured in IT Jungle on April 5, 2021