First off, well done to the EMC vSpecialists for winning the vDodgeball tournament at VMworld, seeing off EMC competitors (and some partners) in the process.
A job done well.
Back to business, here’s a fun thing to do on a Monday morning.
Lets run the Tape Automation Factory Revenue numbers as a percentage of External Storage Factory Revenue through “Zilla’s Big Chart Machine” and see what we end up with.
Ouch!
Look at that red line. You could bobsleigh down it and make Olympic time.
Data Deduplication rose up and smashed the tape business from being a $2B+ industry in 1999 to being less than a Billion dollar industry a decade later. With Remote Office/Branch Office and operational Backup & Recovery all moving to Disk based systems Tape is making it’s last stand in Long Term Retention & Mainframe Tape Storage.
Earlier this year EMC Backup Recovery Systems started moving on Long Term Retention with Data Domain Archiver, now it’s time to start reducing and eliminating tape in Mainframe environments with the EMC Disk Library for Mainframe. (DLm)
Where’s Tape used in the Mainframe? Right now in a lot of places with different read/write performance requirements. It’s used for Backups where you’d dump DASD volume contents. It’s used during HSM Migration so you can free up DASD capacity. It’s used for Data Archiving of fixed content. Used for generic short term work for transient logs, data files and Batch processing.
If you look at the above and map the optimum performance you find you need between two to three different storage platforms if you continue to drag physical tape, those being Physical tape, Virtual tape and Deduplication storage. This is a sub-optimal design in a number of different ways, management alone being one of them.
And that makes Mainframe tape a perfect candidate for reduction/elimination.
Here’s what we’re doing with the DLm 6000 series.
-We’re improving the response time, dropping it to one second and speeding up operations such as tape recycling as a result.
-We’re freeing up Mainframe CPU cycles (You can imagine that IBM aren’t too happy about that when they’re looking to sell upgrades) by offloading things like compression onto the DLm Virtual Tape Engines.
-We’re adding functionality such Data Depduplication and RPO driven low bandwidth bi-directional replication. Think of all the data you can keep online and how you can perform DR testing on it without impacting data offsite operations.
-We’re eliminating the need for tape sharing software by allowing the creation of over one and a half thousand emulated tapes drives.
-And we’re doing it without breaking existing tape management workflows.
The bottom line is tape has nowhere left to hide and the modern world is closing in faster than it will ever admit.
