Zettabyte – Silverton Consulting

Tape still alive, well and growing at Spectra Logic

Posted on October 25, 2011October 25, 2011 by Ray in Storage architecture, Storage density, storage economics, Storage energy use, Tape storage

T-Finity library at SpectraLogic's test facility (c) 2011 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

Today I met with Spectra Logic execs and some of their Media and Entertainment (M&E) customers, and toured their manufacturing, test labs and briefing center. The tour was a blast and the customers Kyle Knack from National Geographic (Nat Geo) Global Media, Toni Perez from Medcom (Panama based entertainment company) and Lee Coleman from Entertainment Tonight (ET) all talked about their use of the T-950 Spectra Logic tape libraries in the media ingest, editing and production processes.

Mr. Collins from ET spoke almost reverently about their T-950 and how it has enabled ET to access over 30 years of video interviews, movie segments and other media they can now use to put together clips on just about any entertainment subject imaginable.

He talked specifically about the obit they did for Michael Jackson and how they were able to grab footage from an interview they did years ago and splice it together with more recent media to show a more complete story. He also showed a piece on some early Eddie Murphy film footage and interviews they had done at the time which they used in a recent segment about his new movie.

All this was made possible by moving to digital file formats and placing digital media in their T-950 tape libraries.

Spectra Logic T-950 (I think) with TeraPack loaded in robot (c) 2011 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

Mr. Knack from Nat Geo Media said every bit of media they get anymore, automatically goes into the library archive and becomes the “original copy” of the media used in case other copies are corrupted or lost. Nat Geo started out only putting important media in the library but found it just cost so much less to just store it in the tape archive that they decided it made more sense to just move all media to the tape library.

Typically they keep two copies in their tape library and important media is also copied to tape and shipped offsite (3 copies for this data). They have a 4-frame T-950 with around 4000 slots and 14 drives (combination of LTO-4 and -5). They use FC and FCoE storage for their primary storage and depend on 1000s of SATA drives for primary storage access.

He said they only use SSDs for some metadata support for their web site. He found that SATA drives can handle their big block sequential and provide consistent throughput and especially important to M&E companies consistent latency.

3D printer at Spectra Logic (for mechanical parts fabrication) (c) 2011 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

Mr. Perez from MedCom had much the same story. They were in the process of moving off of proprietary video tape format (Sony Betacam) to LTO media and digital files. The process is still ongoing although they are more than halfway there for current production.

They still have a lot of old media in Betacam format which will take them years to convert to digital files but they are at least starting this activity. He said a recent move from one site to another revealed that much of the Betacam tapes were no longer readable. Digital files on LTO tape should solve that problem for them when they finally get there.

Matt Starr Spectra Logic CTO talked about the history of tape libraries at Spectra Logic which was founded in 1998 and has been laser focused on tape data protection and tape libraries.

I find it pleasantly surprising that a company today can just supply tape libraries with software and make a ongoing concern of it. Spectra Logic must be doing something right, revenue grew 30% YoY last year and they are outgrowing their current (88K sq ft) office, lab, and manufacturing building they just moved into earlier this year and have just signed to occupy another building providing 55K sq ft of more space.

T-Series robot returning TeraPack to shelf (c) 2011 Silverton Consulting, All Rights Reserved

Molly Rector Spectra Logic CMO talked about the shift in the market from peta-scale (10**15 bytes) storage repositories to exa-scale (10**18 bytes) ones. Ms. Rector believed that today’s cloud storage environments can take advantage of these large tape based, archives to provide much more economical storage for their users without suffering any performance penalty.

At lunch with Matt Starr, Fred Moore (Horison Information Strategies), Mark Peters (Enterprise Strategy Group) and I were talking about HPSS (High Performance Storage System) developed in conjunction with IBM and 5 US national labs that supports vast amounts of data residing across primary disk and tape libraries.

Matt said that there are about a dozen large HPSS sites (HPSS website shows at least 30 sites using it) that store a significant portion of the worlds 1ZB (10**21 bytes) of digital data created this past year (see my 3.3 exabytes of data a day!? post). Later that day talking with Nathan Thompson Spectra Logic CEO, he said these large HPSS sites probably store ~10% of the worlds data, or 100EB. I find that difficult to comprehend that much data at only ~12 sites but the national labs do have lots of data on hand.

Nowadays you can get a Spectra Logic T-Finity tape complex with 122K slot, using LTO-4/-5 or IBM TS1140 (enterprise class) tape drives. This large a T-Finity has 4 rows of tape libraries which uses the ‘Skyway’ to transport a terapack of tape cartridges between one library row to the another. All Spectra Logic libraries are built around a tape cartridge package they call the TeraPack which contains 10 LTO cartridges or (I think) 9-TS1140 tape cartridges (they are bigger than LTO tapes). The TeraPack is used to import or export tapes from the library and all the tape slots in the library.

The software used to control all this is called BlueScale and is used in their T50e, a small, 50 slot library all the way up to the 122K T-Finity tape complex. There are some changes for configuration, robotics and other personalization for each library type but the UI looks exactly the same across any of their libraries. Moreover, BlueScale offers the same enterprise level of functionality (e.g., drive and media life management) services for all Spectra Logic tape libraries.

Day 1 for SpectraPRDay closed with the lab tour and dinner. Day 2 will start discussing futures and will be under NDA so there won’t be much to talk about right away. But from what I can see, Spectra Logic seems to be breaking down the barriers inhibiting tape use and providing tape library systems, that people almost revere.

I haven’t seen that sort of reaction about a tape library since the STK 4400 first came out last century.

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Comments?

3.3 Exabytes-a-day?!

Posted on May 5, 2010May 7, 2010 by Ray in Data growth

Dans la nuit des images (Grand Palais) by dalbera (cc) (from flickr)

NetworkWorld announced today information from an EMC funded IDC study that said the world will create 1.2 Zettabytes (ZB, 10**21 bytes) of data in 2010. By my calculations this is 3.3 Exabytes-a-day (XB,10**18 bytes), 2.3PB (10**15 bytes) a minute or 38TB (10**12 bytes) a second. This seems high and I have talked about how we could get here last year in my Exabyte-a-day post. But what interested me most was a statement that about 35% more information is created than can be stored. Not sure I understand this claim. (Deduplication perhaps?)

Aside from deduplication, what this must mean is that data is being created, sent across the Internet and not stored anywhere except while in flight to be discarded soon after. I assume this data is associated with something like VOIP phone calls and Video chats/conferences, only some portion of which is ever recorded and stored. (Although that will soon no longer be true for audio, see my Yottabytes by 2015 post).

But 35% would indicate ~1 out of every 3 bytes of data is discarded shortly after creation. IDC also expects this factor to grow, not shrink and “… to over 60% over the next few years.” So 3 out of 5 bytes of data will only be available during real-time to be discarded thereafter.

Why this portion should be growing more rapidly than data being stored is hard to fathom. Again video and voice over the internet must be a significant part of the reason.

Storing voice data

I don’t know about most people but I record only a few of my more important calls. Also, these calls happen to be longer on average than my normal calls. Does this mean that 35% of my call data volume is not stored, maybe. All my business calls are done via the Internet nowadays so this data is being created and shipped across the net, used while the call is occurring but never stored other than in flight or by call participants. So non-recorded calls easily qualifies as data created but not stored. Even so, while I may listen to maybe ~33% of the recorded calls afterwards, I overwrite all of them ultimately, keeping only the ones that fit on the recorder’s flash device. Hence, in the end even the voice data I do keep is only retained until I need storage to record more.

Not sure how this is treated in the IDC study but it seems to me to be yet another class of data, maybe call this transient data. I can see similarities of transient data in company backups, log files, database dumps, etc. Most of this data is stored for a limited time only to be later erased/recorded over in the end. How IDC classified such data I cannot tell.

But will transient data grow?

As for video, I currently do no video conferencing so have no information on this. But I am considering moving to another communication platform that supplies Video chat’s and which will make it less intrusive to record calls. While demoing this new capability I have rapidly consumed over 200MB of storage for call recordings. (I need to cap this some way before it gets out of hand). In any case, I believe recording convenience should make such data more store-able over time, not less.

So while I may agree that 1 out of 3 bytes of data created today is not stored, I definitely don’t think that over time that ratio will grow and certainly not to 60%. My only caveat is that there is a limit to the amount of data the world can readily store at any one time and this will ultimately drive all of us to delete data we would rather keep.

But maybe all this just points to a more interesting question, how much data does the world create that is kept for a year, a decade, or a century. But that will need to await another post…

Yottabytes by 2015!?

Posted on November 3, 2009January 27, 2010 by Ray in Data index, File Storage, Storage, Storage density, Storage performance, Storage reliability, Systems

Well, maybe an Exabyte a day was way too small for 2009. NSA is now reporting that they may be storing yottabytes (YB, 10**24) of data by 2015 somewhere in Utah. Later reports have NSA reducing this down to something closer to 1000 PB or so but YB of storage got me thinking.

This points out a couple of issues:

How is the NSA going to store all this data.
How will the NSA be able to retrieve anything in this amount of data.
The storage industry must come up with a new term that applies to 10**27 bytes of storage.

As a first stab at this I would suggest NONABYTE (nona- is latin for nine, (y)otta- is italian for eight). In a similar way, perhaps we could use DECEMABYTE for 10**30 and UNDECEMABYTE for 10**33. That should last us for a couple of years.

Storing a yottabyte of data is no small matter. 10 to 100 Petabytes (PB, 10**15 bytes) of data can be dealt with today with a number of storage systems both cloud and non-cloud. Many cloud providers claim PB of storage under their environment so this is entirely feasible today.

Exabytes (XB, 10**18 bytes) would seem to require an offline archive of data. Of course, somebody could conceivably build such an online storage complex (see below for how). Testing such a system might only be possible during implementation but that would not be unusual for such leading edge projects.

Zetabytes (ZB, 10**21 bytes) seems outside the realm of possibility today being a million PB of storage. But offline archives could conceivably be built even for this amount of storage. It’s conceivable that online storage of an XB of data could be used to support offline storage of a ZB of data.

1 YB of data in perspective

Yottabytes of data seem extremely large. If a minute of standard definition digital video takes ~GB of storage, a yottabyte would be about 10**15 minutes of video.

A minute of MP3 audio (as in a phone conversation) takes roughly a MB of storage, so 1 YB would be about 10**18 minutes of conversation. Realize there are only ~6×10**9 people on the planet. So this is enough storage for a ~100 million (10**8) minutes of conversation from everyone on the planet. Seems like a lot, but who am I to judge.

Also realize there are only 5×10**5 minutes/year, so 10**24 would be enough storage to record everything everybody said over ~333 years (mb/minute 10**6 X 6×10**9 people on earth X 5×10**5 minutes per year=3×10**21 bytes required to store one year of everyone talking for the whole year). Also people sleep, don’t often talk 100% of wake time and most conversations are between two people, so this is very conservative.

1 YB of data at rest

How to construct such a 1 YB archive poses many challenges. One would have to consider a multi-tier/level storage hierarchy made up of both removable and online storage.

Tape or other removable media would be an obvious choice for at least the lowest tier of storage but keeping track of 1.5×10**14 tape volumes (LTO-7 will maybe support 6.4TB (6.4×10**9 bytes per cartridge) seems outside today’s capabilities.

Similar quantities of disk drives would be required to store 1 YB of data but nobody would consider storing all this online. Consider that only 5.4×10**8 disk drives were shipped in 2008 and it becomes obvious that large portions of the 1YB archive must be offline. Deduplication would help but audio and video doesn’t dedupe well.

But that’s nothing, try keeping track of the 10**18 to 10**20 files (assuming 10**6 for audio down to 10**4 for text files of bytes per file).

I think this calls for an object store of some type. 10**6 objects are feasible today scaling up to 10**18 through 10**20 would be a significant leap but not outside technology available 5 (or maybe 10) years hence.

Next one must consider the catalog for such a storage complex. Let’s assume these are conversations and use the 10**18 number, and just keeping 100 bytes of metadata per file, the catalog would take 10**20 bytes of storage. Of course, 100 bytes seems pretty limiting to record all the important data about a conversation or even a text file, so 1000 bytes seems more realistic. Thus, we would need 10**21 bytes of storage just for the catalog. It seems even portions of the catalog would need to be offline to be realistically stored. This would not be optimal but would accommodate a rudimentary listing of the 10**18 element catalog as a last resort.

Searching 1 YB of data

NSA would probably want at least to search the catalog for items of interest, like a person’s name, a phone number, or maybe even time of call. Indexes take anywhere from 20 to 100% of the data being searched. Let’s say with great people working on the project they can get the catalog index down to 10% of the storage being searched. So there is yet another 10**20 bytes of data for the catalog to be searchable. Now we would want the majority of this to be online and directly accessible but even this is 100,000 PB of data. Way beyond today’s capabilities for online accessible storage.

Of course, it’s possible that the agency might want to search the contents of the conversation for items of interest such as words used. Any content index would take vastly more storage than a simple catalog index but maybe this could be shrunk down to only 100% of the catalog size or 10**21 bytes of storage. Again a 1,000,000 PB of data is unlikely to be kept online in total.

I am beginning to see how NSA and Mitre may dave come up with the YB figure. 10**20 for an index 10**21 for a catalog, and another 10**21 for a vocabulary index to 10**18 conversations. Now YB of storage is starting to make sense. If you took the 10**18 conversations down say to 10**15, with a catalog of 10**18 bytes, indexes of 10**19 bytes this might be even more realistic. But, even 10**15 conversations seems a bit much for 2015.

Ingesting, indexing, and protecting 1 YB of storage all pose interesting challenges of their own which I will leave for later posts.