I have come to believe that Kamandi is really the last IBM Tape & Mainframe sales person on earth.
Kamandi rows up river to pitch the new LTO 9845600 drive to the beast people.
In one of those wacky exchanges you can only appreciate with a small amount of hindsight this week Hu tried to push Diligent's (IBM's) VTL over the top even though Hitachi themselves didn't see it as strategic enough to invest any money in it the way they did with BlueArc...
Another surprise may be that tape libraries are such large consumers of power. Since tape is not spinning most of the time they should consume much less power than spinning disk - right? Apparently not if they are sitting in a robotic tape library with a lot of mechanical moving parts and tape drives that have to accelerate and decelerate at tremendous speeds. A Virtual Tape Library with de-duplication factor of 25:1 and large capacity disks may draw significantly less power than a robotic tape library for a given amount of capacity.
...while Tony P. tries to hold it's head under water the same week IBM spent anywhere in the range of $160M to $200M to add it to Moshe's toy box.
The analysts even considered a disk-based Virtual Tape Library (VTL). Focusing just on backups, at a 20:1 deduplication ratio, the VTL solution was still 5 times per expensive than the tape library. If you use the 25:1 ratio that Hu Yoshida mentions in his post above, that would still be 4 times more than a tape library.
If Diligent's VTL focus shifts you'll know it's a result of IBM's all tape all the time backup strategy. They're number one in the tape market. Not two or three. Number One. So like the Red Queen it's a case of "Off with it's head!" should anything look like it threatens the linear media cash cow.
And remember, IBM would prefer you not to buy the IBM de-duping VTL. Though they might want you to buy a de-dup license for the next version of TSM. But only if the data will eventually end up in a tape storage pool where you can reclaim and collocate it for hours on end.
But don't forget to buy enough tape drives so you can still carry out restores while TSM is doing that. Not that you'd have that worry were you using an EMC Disk Library..I mean Virtual Tape Library with TSM.
But it could be much worse.
You could be waiting for HDS to work on solving your backup challenges. No help there but you can be sure their parent will have a next generation version of their market leading "vibrating relaxation aid", the Hitachi Magic Wand, available to solve other challenges.
Buuuuzzzzzzzzzzzz!
