Archiving is the most impactful way to alleviate overall storage costs, which today, consume up to 70% of IT hardware budgets. Organizations are pressured to build reliable and auditable archive practices to meet regulatory requirements. Given the growing importance of archives, is tape, disk or some other storage technology the best choice for building an archive? Please join Jon Toigo, data management veteran, to discuss the latest developments among competing archive platforms and reveal the six key criteria for building enterprise archives.

2. First Reaction: Stupid Question
• Well, a silly question, at least.
• It suggests that all archives are the same,
but we know better…
– Active archive: data still referenced but
seldom changed
– Deep archive: data rarely re-referenced
and never changed
• Different kinds of archive suggest
different requirements from the archive
platform: no “one size fits all” Historical data, intellectual property,
data retained for regulatory compliance,
conforming to an archive strategy…
Production data, usually files, with limited
re-reference rates, stored economically…

3. Platform Design 101

4. Anyway, Disk is Already Used by Many Firms to
Platform Data Archives
…both on-premise and in the cloud

5. Foundation of the Case for Disk-Based Archiving
• Familiarity of the technology
• Ease of deployment*
• Data migration and copy support*
• Improving disk capacity/performance
• Availability of value-add data
reduction/compression technology *well, sort of, maybe

6. But Also a Few Drawbacks…
• Acquisition cost (value-add
software is cost accelerator)
• Bit error rate of disk
• Energy consumption
• Silo-ing and proprietary design
(lock-in costs/difficult migration)
• Lack of data reduction standards
• Poor hardware management
capabilities

7. Tape Provides an Alternative
• Linear Tape File System (LTFS)
• BlackPearl and Object
Storage
• BaFe tape coatings
• Capacity, resiliency, economy National Petascale Computing Facility’s Blue
Waters supercomputer uses 380 PB of tape
storage, 26 PB of disk…

8. Tape, too, has some Rough Edges
• Unfamiliar to “millennials”
• Access speeds can be an issue
• File systems like LTFS
optimized for “long block”
files, not small files

9. But Not Sufficient Cause to
Count Tape Out…
• Even the de-duplicating
disk array folks have
agreed on this score…in
the past, at least!

10. Time for Some Sanity
• Archive is an application
with a “personality”
• Rather than Disk vs Tape…
• …Maybe All of the Above is
the better strategy!

11. What About Front-Ending Tape
with a Disk Cache
• Remember Disk to Disk to
Tape?
• Why not tier your archive:
– Low cost, high capacity disk
for Active Archive
– Tape for Deep Archive

12. Disk Makes a Good Tape Cache
• Whether LTFS or BlackPearl
– In LTFS, disk cache can expedite
access to tape-based files by
spoofing access latency
– With BlackPearl, disk provides a
preparatory area for coalescing
objects into buckets before
writing to LTFS tape…

13. “All of the Above”
• The best strategy
– Matching infrastructure to data
access requirements and anticipated
data growth
– Leveraging the complementarity of
magnetic storage media
technologies, even in “clouds”…

14. Six Criteria for Building an Effective Archive
Platform
1. Know your data
2. Think about ingestion
3. Think about verification
4. Think about space
5. Think about skills
6. Think about TCO
Know
Your
Data
How to
Ingest
How to
Verify
Space
Needed
Skills
Needed
TCO

15. Number 7 and Beyond…
• We could go on, but…
• Introducing Bruce Kornfeld, CMO,
Spectra Logic Corporation
– Premiere provider of both tape and
disk archive platforms
– Innovator with Deep Storage and
BlackPearl technologies
• Thank you and welcome, Bruce

16. nTier Verde –
Simply Affordable File Storage
• No previous storage experience required
• Half the cost of traditional file storage
• Never lose data

17. • Effortless Setup
– 30 minutes from box to production!
• Fast online expansion and
management
– Disk pools can be expanded in < 1
minute
– Thin provisioning for automated
expansion
No Previous Storage Experience Required

18. • Store more, spend less
– List price as low as 48¢ per GB
– No software fees
• Compression, Snapshots and Replication included
• Quick Installation
– PS dollars focus on solution, not install
• PriceLock Support Pricing
– Avoid the support hockey stick
Half the Cost of Traditional File Storage

19. • Software eliminates data corruption and loss
– Advanced checksums and multiple parity options
– All writes committed instantaneously
• Rock Solid Hardware
– High quality, Enterprise SAS capacity drives
• Everything you need… Nothing you don’t
– Intelligent rebuilds
– Compression
– Data Integrity
Never Lose Your Data

20. Verde Customers

21. nTier Verde 2U nTier Verde 4U
Supported Hard Drives 4 TB 7200 RPM SAS Hard Drives
Master Node Capacity* 6 to 11 Drives
24 TB to 44 TB RAW
10 to 35 Drives
40 TB to 140 TB RAW
Expansion Node Support 1 Expansion Node 9 Expansion Nodes
Max Capacity* 220 TB RAW Max 1.7 PB RAW Max
Parity Options Mirroring, Single Parity, Double Parity, Triple Parity
Software Options Intelligent Rebuilds, Compression, Replication,
Hot Spares Unlimited
Supported Protocols NFS, CIFS
3 x 1 GigE Data Ports Standard Standard
2 x 10 GigE Data Ports Optional Standard
nTier Verde
* Using 4 TB drives

22. 1. Know your data
2. Think about ingestion
3. Think about verification
4. Think about space
5. Think about skills
6. Think about TCO
Six Criteria for Building
an Effective Archive Platform

23. Know Your Data

24. Think About
Ingestion
TAPE Libraries
10 GigE
10 GigE
Unlimited
Scalability
Gigabit Ethernet
10 GigE (standard)
Gigabit Ethernet
10 GigE (standard)
DATA CREATION
UsersUsers
Objects
DS3Data Management
APPSFILES
CIFS and NFS
BlackPearl
nTierVerde
NAS Disk

25. Library Lifecycle
Management
Media Lifecycle
Management
Drive Lifecycle
Management
Data Integrity
Verification
Think About Verification

26. Tape library footprint comparisons for storage of 50PB
Spectra T-Finity capable of expanding to 380PB
Spectra Verde
10-Unit Disk Rack
1.7PB
Think About Space

27. Think About Skills
Verde-Unbox Verde-Into Rack
Verde-Plug IN Verde-Turn ON
Verde-Configure
Verde User Interface Home Screen

28. Think About TCO