Give Me A Fulcrum And A Lever Long Enough, And I Can Move Your Data

July 13, 2022 Brad Jensen

An old adage about the power of mechanics and physics illustrates perfectly how we feel about virtual tape libraries, and not just the ones made by us, but about other VTL wares out there in the field: Give me a fulcrum and a lever long enough and I can move the world.

We know that there are other good VTL tools out there, and it is good because the competition keeps us all honest. The important thing is that using VTL brings IT organizations out of the Stone Age of managing data archives and backups.

First off, if you are still using real tape drives and real tape cartridges, tapes come in certain physical sizes and capacities, so always using a certain amount of media, whether you need it or not. And second, just the process of mechanically handling the tapes, even if you have an autoloader, which is not cheap, eventually somebody has to come in and removes the tapes with all of your data on it and put them on a shelf or in a vault or, as some reckless people do, put them in the trunk of their car until they come up with a better plan. But it is even worse than that. You have to keep track of the tapes, and load them in the right order and heaven help you if one tape is missing. The whole process a little more unwieldy than using VTL software, which tricks the IBM i system into thinking it is talking to a tape drive when it isn’t.

You have to worry about not only the moment when something goes wrong with the system, but also about the next moment when you worry about whether or not your last backup was complete or even works at all. The impression we have within the IBM i industry is that you are going to backup to tape and never look at it. To be fair, there are some people who backup to tape and then the next day reload one library or one little thing. But most people don’t do full restores unless they’re doing a test environment or they are restoring to a remote location. And both of those things, as it turns out, are far easier to do with a VTL than a real tape library.

That is due to the way ViTL works. The ViTL software streams data out of your IBM i, whether it is small things like programs created by developers or a big wonking database that is several years old, and as you back up this data, it puts it on a disk array at the exact same size as it needs and no more, and it can be randomly accessed in a fairly straightforward way, unlike tape, which has to read from the beginning of the cartridge until it hits the data you are seeking in an archive. Our ViTL software keeps pointers for each library on the “tape” and can go right to it, whereas on a real tape, you have to stream through the physical media – whir, whir, whir for a very long time – to get this one file.

You don’t have to think about whether you need one, two, or three cartridges to do a backup and buy an autoloader. The disk array and our software, linked to the IBM i box with a Fibre Channel controller, just looks like one humungous tape drive to the system and away you go. This is a big deal because a lot of people in the IBM i market are backing up 25 TB to 30 TB a night.

Another important thing is that once this data is on the VTL, it can be transferred to any other media, from an S3 bucket on Amazon Web Services or a BLOB on Microsoft Azure to a flash drive in your pocket. So ten years from now, when IBM is shipping the AS/4000 using the Power12 processor, you will be able to restore that data to this system of the future. This is helpful for people upgrading from very old systems to newer ones. There are format incompatibility issues with different vintages of LTO tapes that do not happen with ViTL.

These days, when we run our ViTL software on an array, we are recommending customers move to storage based on flash SSDs or even NVM-Express flash, which comes in card and drive form factors. Disk drives are slower on reads for sure and usually on writes, too. If you are backing up multiple terabytes per day, that is different and it can build up fast over time and flash can be prohibitively expensive. Flash has gotten so cheap it is the best option now in terms of price and performance for a VTL’s storage. If you shop around, 8 TB of raw flash costs about $1,000. The other day I put together a system with 40 TB of flash SSDs and a RAID 5 controller that cost less than $5,000. This used to be prohibitively expensive.

The heavy data volumes can all be mitigated to a certain extent by deduplication software. We have our own deduplication software for the IBM i platform, called BEdupe, that I designed and Erik Dabrowsky, our lead programmer, wrote. But our dedupe only works with IBM i data. The good news is that several excellent dedupe programs can work with Windows and Linux data, such as Rubrik, ExaGrid, and Cohesity. These companies bring us lots of lots of business every month, and we really appreciate it. They’ve got very good products and they can be used for backing up windows and stuff like that all the time. And our product only dedupes tape images at this time – we are not trying to dedupe a SAN or something like that.

Most of our customers buy the ViTL system from us as an appliance. But it’s a very customized appliance. You tell us what you are doing – you are backing up 4 TB a day, and you want to keep all of the daily backups for a month and you want to keep the monthly backups for 36 months and keep your annual backups forever. Whatever. We sit down with a pencil and paper – excuse me, our very sophisticated computer system – and design that appliance for you and price it out.

The key to ViTL is that the IBM i platform just sees our VTL as a Fibre Channel-attached tape drive, and none of our software is even running on the IBM i. A lot of our larger customers use IBM’s BRMS or HelpSystems RobotSave to automate backups and restores, and they basically just turn it on and pretty much forget about it.

It just works. Unlike so many other things on Earth these days.

Brad Jensen, the founder and chief executive officer of Electronic Storage Corporation.

This content was sponsored by Electronic Storage Corporation.

** Editor’s Note: To focus on the VTL and backup products, Electronic Storage Corporation has stopped development and sales on its document management products. So if you are looking to buy some document management tools, Jensen would be happy to talk to you.

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