The challenges of data protection: tape automation and TCO

Computer Technology Review, June, 2004 by Tom Wultich

Many enterprise data centers today report that they are faced with the same challenge: Proliferating amounts of data to protect with flat or often declining budgets and headcount. It is rapidly becoming every data center manager's predicament, how to do more with less.

New industry regulations and compliance issues complicate the equation by mandating that certain types of information be on record for years. Regulations such as those under Sarbanes-Oxley and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) require certain information to be retained for many years. There appears to be no end in sight for the mounting regulatory requirements for digital storage.

While there are many ways to go about storing and protecting data, one of the most common solutions to store more with less budget and headcount is through consolidation. In fact, research has concluded that the top budgeted activity in enterprise data centers today is consolidation.

Why Consolidate?

Consolidation of multiple tape libraries into an enterprise backup solution can save in a variety of ways, by reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO) and thereby generating a healthy return on the customer's return on investment (ROI). Through consolidation, companies are able to uncover the inefficiencies of an unconsolidated environment; examples include multiple pools of storage that are not being fully utilized, expensive to maintain, hard to manage, and difficult and expensive to grow. Consolidation can often dramatically reduce these inefficiencies, allowing customers to achieve the objective: Store more with less budget and headcount.

Benefits of Consolidation

Manageability: For one, it is far easier to manage one large tape library than it is to manage several small libraries. This is extremely important, given today's decreasing headcount and increasing responsibility of the data center manager.

Scalability: Since growth is a given in any data center environment, it's important for companies to protect their investments with a library that is easy to scale. One large library can easily scale to hundreds and thousands of terabytes and beyond. This is a far more cost-effective approach and easier to manage than trying to balance workloads across multiple smaller libraries or buying more small libraries.

Availability, reliability and serviceability: Consolidation, even if it means stepping up to an enterprise solution from a mid-range solution, will drive system availability requirements to near-continuous levels. The good news is that the latest large enterprise tape library systems are now designed with features like the ability to add more slots and drives while operating. They also offer failover mechanisms, such as redundant hot-swap robotics, power supplies and drives. Thus, moving to an enterprise library means moving to a higher quality system--which means fewer headaches for any IT manager.

Maintenance: Since budget dollars are precious in today's economy, consolidation is also attractive because of its low cost-per-terabyte for maintenance expenses. A consolidated library can be far less expensive to maintain than the sum of multiple small libraries. Furthermore, consolidation typically allows for companies to invest in fewer tape drives, thus saving additional maintenance dollars.

Power and cooling: When funds are tight, every dollar spent counts. A consolidated solution requires much less power and cooling than a multiple library environment.

Footprint: A consolidated solution uses significantly less floor space than a non-consolidated environment. Multiple small libraries must each have their own power systems, control systems, and robotics--all of which take space on data center floors and require maintenance access points.

Considerations Before Moving to a Consolidated Environment

Though the move from multiple libraries to one enterprise solution may require initial investments in terms of time and money, it can pay off rapidly. So what should the data center manager look for when moving to a consolidated setting?

Sharing: It's important to invest in a system that supports a data center's existing and future architecture. The library should virtualize itself from the ISV application. This allows flexibility; users can share across applications, should the need to consolidate different backup applications arise. It also allows a customer to more easily change backup applications in the future.

Flexibility: Companies want to invest in a solution that is extremely flexible and allows for investment protection. Look for:

* Easy-to-manage, mixed media and drive support. Support of mixed media (such as enterprise drives like T9840 and T9940 and mid-range drives such as LTO and SDLT) will accommodate both existing and future needs. This should be a true mixed-media offering, one that does not force management of partitions, which are inefficient and defeat the purpose of consolidation.

* Native Fibre, ESCON, FICON connectivity in order to connect all relevant servers and mainframes and to eliminate the need for conversion hubs and switches, such as SCSI to Fibre or Fibre to FICON.