SNW Spectra Logic Active Archive Briefing
Spectra Logic was at the show promoting a new initiative called Active Archive. Launching this week, the focus will be to promote the use of tape as an archive technology. Active Archive proposes front ending tape with a file system to ease access.
The ability to front end tape with a file system has been available for years but generally was isolated to specific use cases typically found on UNIX file systems. Now though product like FileTek’s StorHouse can virtualize the storage devices on the backend of an archive and one of those devices can be tape. Combining this technology with tape libraries based on LTO-4 or 5 leads to extremely cost effective storage. We calculate LTO-5 to be at about $50 per TB.
Monday, April 19, 2010
Putting a file system in front of tape means that moving data to tape is as simple as copying data from one hard drive to another. This opens up a wide range of options for its integration into the enterprise. Leveraging tape as an archive could be as simple as copying old data to a file system that then manages the tape library for you. Again nothing revolutionary here, but the software that manages this process has improved as has the reliability and of course density of tape.
It also means that tape unaware applications can suddenly become tape aware. File virtualization products like we discuss in our “What is File Virtualization?” article are excellent examples. Now the archive tier could be tape.
There are other discussion points around this subject as well:
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What’s being done to improve tape media, drive and library reliability? -
What becomes disk’s role in a tape archive strategy?
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What becomes tape’s role in backup? Should it even be used for backup anymore?
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How far up the storage tier can the active archive go? Can it become primary storage?
George Crump, Senior Analyst
SNW Briefing
Additional SNW Meetings
Storage Switzerland is at SNW in force again this year and as in years past we will be doing our best to bring you continuous updates from the event. These reports are quick summaries of our meetings at the show; look for more detailed analysis on our blogs on Information Week and Network Computing.
