ultrium/lto 6 tape drive technology

LTO‐6 Tape Drive Technology Overview

June 2013

LTO‐6 Tape Drive Technology Overview 2

Contents

Abstract ............................................................................................................... 3

Introduction ........................................................................................................ 3

More About Linear Tape Open Technology ........................................................... 5

LTO‐6 Partitioning Supports LTFS .................................................................................................... 6

Basic Stats: LTO‐5 and LTO‐6 ................................................................................ 6

Efficiency ............................................................................................................. 6

Open Systems Advantages: Price and Connectivity ............................................... 7

Power Requirements ............................................................................................ 8

Media and Backward Compatibility ...................................................................... 9

Automation’s Role in Using LTO Effectively ........................................................... 9

Automation and Power .................................................................................................................... 9

Density ............................................................................................................................................ 11

Library Features that Make the Most of LTO ................................................................................ 11

The Future: Roadmaps ...................................................................................... 11

Data Migration ................................................................................................... 12

Specifications ..................................................................................................... 13

Conclusion ......................................................................................................... 13

Copyright ©2015 Spectra Logic Corporation. BlueScale, Spectra, SpectraGuard, Spectra Logic, TeraPack, TFinity, and TranScale are registered trademarks of Spectra Logic Corporation. ArchiveGrade, BlackPearl, IntraCloud, and nTier Verde are trademarks of Spectra Logic Corporation. All rights reserved worldwide. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners. All library features and specifications listed in this white paper are subject to change at any time without notice.


AB S T R A CT

With the release of LTO‐6, Linear Tape‐Open (LTO) tape technology continues to dominate the market. LTO is the most used data protection and archiving media by organizations with terabytes of data to store, up through petabytes and more. LTO‐6, the sixth generation of the technology, stores 2.5 TB of data native (not compressed) on tape—with compression the value is 6.25 TB of data per tape. LTO‐6 improves on LTO‐5 performance as well, increasing from 140 MB/s to 160 MB/s. LTO‐6 and its role in data protection are reviewed in some detail.

INT RO D UC T IO N

Along with the Spectra Logic launch of tape libraries providing LTO‐6, the sixth generation of the successful LTO program, tape is again in the spotlight. Tape is fast, affordable and reliable and increasingly important as data continues its steep growth trajectory. This growth has fueled tremendous advances in tape storage, many of which are provided by LTO‐6 technology.

LTO‐6 continues the tape industry’s commitment to low power consumption and low carbon emissions. Issues, such as regulatory compliance and Big Data, will continue to drive the use of tape. The IBM and Fujifilm announcement of a 35 TB (native) capacity tape demonstrates that tape is far from its theoretical limits and has plenty of life left.

Figure 1: Tape capacity


Tape is empirically the best removable media, and remains the hands‐down leader in multiple additional categories. These include cost‐for‐capacity, and newly notable, the low energy cost per GB of data stored—after all, a tape on a shelf or in a library slot doesn’t use any energy, while data on a disk requires constant power. The archival lifetime of tape for storing data securely, maintaining the data’s integrity, is also unmatched, with an archival life of 30 or more years given an easily maintained environment.

Among tape technologies, Linear Tape Open (LTO) technology is the recognized leader in the market, with more than 4.0 million drive shipments to date1 and over 200 million tape cartridges sold (as of June, 2012). 2 The chart demonstrates the rise of LTO at the expense of all other formats, including Exabtye QIC, Mammoth, Travan, SAIT, DLT, AIT, and SDLT, through the main transition period (2000 – 2007).

The chart shows recent data. Note: timeframe is just prior to LTO‐6’s introduction. With the recent introduction of LTO‐6, in December, 2012, LTO volumes are expected to trend upward again in 2013 and 2014.

Figure 2: Tape drive technologies

LTO Ultrium drives now represent 100% of all tape drives that shipped in the mid‐range market in Q4’12 market share, as reported in IDC’s Worldwide Tape Drive QView for CY2012. 3 Further, LTO is increasingly a major player in the largest of enterprises, such as U.S. National Laboratories and enormous international corporations.

1 IDC’s Worldwide Tape Drive QView for CY2012.

2 LTO Consortium Announcement June, 2012.

3 IDC’s Worldwide Tape Drive QView for CY2012.


Please note that, in this paper:

Values shown are those for Fibre Channel drives at maximum typical use.

The industry standard multiplier of 1,000 is used rather than 1024 in converting bytes to megabytes, gigabytes, etc.

Nearly all values are native ‐‐ that is, compressed values are explicitly noted when used. This is done because the rate of data compression varies significantly, with some data not able to be compressed at all. The native throughput shows the maximum possible throughput without compression.

Values may have been rounded.

MO R E ABO UT L I N E A R TA PE OP E N

TE C H N O L O G Y

Linear Tape Open technology (LTO) is built on open tape standards developed in a joint venture by a consortium of tape technology vendors. The consortium sought to provide more choices to users in what had been previously a closed‐development arena. The LTO consortium of HP, IBM and now Quantum oversees LTO technology development and its roadmap.

LTO, sometimes referred to as Ultrium, is referred to as open format because users have multiple sources for drives and tapes. LTO licenses tape manufacturing to multiple vendors, using a common tape format that ensures compatibility between different vendors’ tape and drives. So far, HP and IBM are the drive manufacturers, and the source of the drives used in automated robotic libraries.

Ultrium LTO‐6 format, the sixth generation of LTO, continues to offer the encryption feature introduced in LTO‐4. It is worth noting that in almost every case (or possibly in every case), unless Spectra libraries are used, a separate key management package, non‐trivial to install and use, must be implemented before the encryption is usable at any site.

This drive generation continues to utilize a Giant Magneto Resistive (GMR) head to reduce wear on media. This technology was implemented in LTO‐5 and is also available in IBM TS1140 drives. The sixth generation of LTO has just been released, and generations 7 and 8 are promised on the current roadmap, with additional generations expected. LTO will be around for a while, which is good news for those charged with protecting data for the long‐term.


LTO ‐6 P A R T I T I O N I N G S U P P O R T S LTFS Additional drive features include a media partitioning option that increases efficiency of tape data access. IBM‐provided LTFS (Linear Tape File System) is an example of how partitioning can be used. Descriptive information about a tape’s contents—metadata— is stored in the first partition, and the data is stored on the second partition. LTFS supports an option of drag‐and‐ drop files to or from the tape, and the option of double‐clicking files to open them in their associated application.

LTFS and similar applications and file systems promise the use of tape as an active archive—that is, as an accessible storage media for files in active use. Spectra Logic, a founding member of the Active Archive Alliance (www.activearchive.com), is supporting efforts to expand access to data across storage media, including disk and tape, to increase the availability of all data belonging to an organization.

BA S I C ST AT S : LTO ‐5 AN D LTO ‐6

The basic specifications about any media are capacity and speed. LTO‐6 and the earlier generation LTO‐5 native and compressed capacities and transfer rates are shown in the table.

Table 1: Drive technology data transfer and capacity

Drive Technology

Data Transfer Native

Data Transfer Compressed

Native Capacity

Compression Ratio

LTO‐6 160 MB/s 400 MB/s 2.5 TB 2.5:1

LTO‐5 140 MB/s 280 MB/s 1.5 TB 2:1

EF F I C I E N C Y

To keep data flowing smoothly to and from drives, LTO technology provides these two features: Buffer: Each drive has a buffer to help in keeping a drive operating at an optimal speed—caching data that can be used to keep the tape streaming through the drive. The tape stops only when the buffer contains no data to be written (buffer underflow), or when it is full of data during reading (buffer overflow).

Speed‐matching: Spectra's IBM LTO drive can operate at multiple speeds to match data as it’s sent from the host to ensure optimal throughput— reducing stop‐starts and repositioning. The drives match the speed of the tape to the rate of data streaming into the drive. For example, the LTO‐6 drive, as with the prior generation, can drop to any of 14 speeds to optimize throughput.


Table 2: Drive technology buffer and speed matching

Drive Technology

Buffer Speed Matching

LTO‐6 1,024 MB 14

LTO‐5 512 MB 14

OP E N SY ST EM S AD V AN T AG E S : PRI C E

A N D CO N N E CT I V IT Y

As noted above, LTO media is available from multiple vendors and as a result, competitively‐ priced and relatively inexpensive. This makes LTO a straightforward choice, given that the drives that compete with LTO are typically proprietary drives that cost six times as much as LTO drives. The dominance of LTO technology can be attributed, in part, to the fact that it’s an advantage to have a choice of vendors, with competition that leads to lower media and drive costs.

Figure 3: Pricing, historical and predictive

LTO drives, through LTO‐6, have evolved to take advantage of faster host interfaces. As seen below, LTO‐6 maintains the same interfaces as LTO‐5.


Table 3: Drive technology comparison, interfaces

Drive Interface

LTO‐6 Open systems:

8 GB Fibre Channel , dual port

4 Gb/s, 2Gb/s, 1Gb/s backwards‐compatible FC

Serial‐attached SCSI (SAS) at 6 Gbit/sec

3Gb/s and 4Gb/s backward‐compatible for SAS

LTO‐5 Open systems:

8 GB Fibre Channel , dual port

4 Gb/s, 2Gb/s, 1Gb/s backwards‐compatible FC

Serial‐attached SCSI (SAS) at 6 Gbit/sec

3Gb/s and 4Gb/s backward‐compatible for SAS

PO W ER RE Q UI R E M E N T S

LTO‐6 drives automatically seek the lowest possible power use. When the drive is idle, with no tape mounted and handling no commands, the drive can use as little as 5w. Power saving mode is automatically initialized by the drive, and requires no user interaction.

The power required by drives spans a considerable range. To compare power use so that the results can be easily compared, divide energy use by quantity of data capacity per tape (for example, watt per TB of data stored).

Table 4: Drive technology comparison, energy

Drive Technology Power Use (typical, not maximum)

Native Capacity

Watts/TB

LTO‐6 27.0 watts 2,500 GB 10.8w/TB

LTO‐5 27.0 watts 1,500 GB 19.7w/TB

To provide context in understanding drive power use and LTO power savings, the following charts compare the power use by multiple drive types, including proprietary drive technology such as Sun/Oracle/STK T10000B drive.


Figure 4: Power use for drive generations

Power use is also affected by library automation, as discussed later in this paper.

ME D I A A N D BA C K W AR D CO M P A T IB I L I T Y

As tape technologies evolve, a drive manufacturer must weigh the size of its installed base and the willingness of that base to switch to a new media type as the manufacturer introduces new tape drives. In general, new tape drives use new media types to take advantage of the latest head and media materials. Once the drive technology is established, the drive typically provides some backwards read/write compatibility—it can read from and write to older generations of media.

Table 5: Drive technologies and supported media

Drive Technology Media supported

LTO‐6 Reads LTO‐4, LTO‐5, and LTO‐6 tapes Writes to LTO‐5 and LTO‐6 tapes

LTO‐5 Reads LTO‐3, LTO‐4, and LTO‐5 tapes Writes to LTO‐4 and LTO‐5 tapes

AU T O MA T IO N ’S RO L E I N US I N G LTO

EF F E CT I V E L Y

Tape automation through robotic libraries multiplies the effectiveness of tape in storing large quantities of data efficiently and affordably.

A U T O M A T I O N A N D P O W E R Power use is an increasingly important topic in data center management. Some regions of the country and world are reaching the maximum power available in specific regions, such as the Northeastern United States. Everywhere, concerns about both costs and the environment are also emphasizing reduced power use. Data centers are significant users of power in the world. If data centers constituted their own industry, they would be the sixth largest of all industrial power

LTO‐ and LTO‐ lowest p use

All libra LTO‐ drives slots

LTO‐5&6


consumers. Storage uses about 40% of data energy, a percentage that would be drastically reduced to about 4% by making appropriate use of tape.

Power is best assessed by looking at how much power the drive in a specific library uses, and the overall library power use, rather than looking solely at drive power use. The following shows power use of specific drives and compares use of one LTO‐4 drive across multiple libraries:

Figure 5: Power use for drive generations

Even using an identical drive, power use varies considerably depending on how each library uses the drive. This has to do with how the library itself is constructed—each drive type is engineered to work with each specific library, and some of the sleds on which the drives are inserted in the library are more power‐hungry than others. In the example above, the power use by an LTO‐4 (similar results expected for LTO‐5 and LTO‐6) drive in the T950 library is considerably lower than the power used to run one LTO‐4 drive in competing models. In every case, the LTO drives consume less power than proprietary drive technologies.

Figure 6: Efficiency of T950 and competitors

LTO‐ and LTO‐ lowest power use

LTO‐ watts

LTO‐5&6


D E N S I T Y The space required by a large volume of tapes is increasingly important given the expense of data center space coupled with the seemingly endless growth of data to be protected. Using a robotics library and high capacity LTO tapes, which can store a lot of data in a small space, is a distinct advantage.

L I B R A R Y F E A T U R E S T H A T M A K E T H E M O S T O F

LTO Some libraries, such as the Spectra Logic Tape Series family of libraries, provide additional features that enhance tape. For example, Spectra libraries BlueScale™ software tracks drive, media and

library health, increasing reliability and protection of high‐value data. By tracking errors and other data about drive technology, the libraries can report on factors that range from the lifetime use of the tape to reporting on drive and tape errors, to help administrators identify problem tapes and drives before they affect operations.

The Spectra BlueScale™ features make it particularly easy to identify problem tapes and drives through the use of icons that display on the graphical interface, which is on the library’s front panel and available anywhere through a web browser.

Figure 7: Drive health indicator messages

This is only a sample of the kinds of features to look for in selecting LTO automation. Spectra Logic libraries provide many features that enhance LTO’s strengths.

TH E FU T UR E : RO A DM A P S

Although disk has established itself well in backup and protection practices, tape still has a crucial role. According to James Snyder, Senior Systems Administrator of the Library of Congress Repository Collections National AV Center, tape is the only medium that they trust for data preservation.4

4 Snyder, James. “Creating a Digital Repository for Library of Congress (LoC)” Focus on Preserving Our

Digital Data Workshop, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Gaithersburg, Md., 3/29‐31.


Wikibon analyst David Vellante said the LTO roadmap looks like it will keep pace with disk into the future. “I think they'll get [LTO] to over 30 TB," he said. "By having this roadmap, it means you can back up big, honking SATA disks however big they get in the near term.” 5

LTO promised to be around awhile: “Generations 7 and 8 have been added to the LTO product roadmap, calling for native capacities of 6.4 TB and 12.8 TB, respectively.”6 The next generations of LTO will continue to increase capacity and performance: LTO‐6 provides native transfer rates up to 160 MB/s. Roadmap plans for LTO‐7 COMPRESSED are estimated to be up to 788 MB/s, and LTO‐8 COMPRESSED up to 1,180 MB/s.

DA T A M I G R AT IO N

At some point, every IT administrator faces the issue of whether to migrate data to a new generation of technology or a new technology overall. With the increasing regulatory vigilance required by many organizations, this can have long‐term consequences, since old media must be usable even years from now.

One way to manage the problem of technology upgrades in data storage is to identify a tape technology that has a long roadmap and to select an automated tape library that supports partitioning. This way, you can store older media generations, still with read access to the data, while writing data using the newest and highest performance drive with the highest capacity media. Partitions are each a part of the library that is designated as its own virtual library and appears to the outside network as its own library. Each partition can hold a specific drive generation and its media. Logical partitioning such as this can prevent the need for data migration and preserve the site’s original investment in older media.

Further, consider whether you need to maintain multiple types of technology. If you do, evaluate whether it is most efficient and cost‐effective to keep a smaller, older library or stand‐ alone drive to read the older tapes, along with using a new library with the fastest and highest capacity technology, or whether to invest in an automated tape library that supports multiple types of technology and its media.

Given the many factors you can take into account, the key is to prioritize the factors that are most important to your unique data storage requirements, and choose the technology that best meets your priorities.

5 Pariseau, Beth. “Hewlett‐Packard launches LTO‐5 tape,” Data Backup News SearchDataBackup.com,

29 Mar 2010. 6 LTO Consortium, “LTO Program Extends Product Roadmap Through Generation 8,“ Press Release,

April 14, 2010.


SP E C IF I CA T IO N S

The values in the chart summarize some of the key specifications relating to LTO technology.

Table 6: Drive comparison data

Drive Transfer rate MB/s nat/comp

Capacity Native‐

nat/comp

Buff er MB

Speed match

watts max‐ avg

w/TB MTBF power‐ on hr

Uncor‐ rected

Bit Error Rate

Head life Inter‐ faces

(Gb/sec)

LTO‐6 160 / 400 MB/s

2.5 / 6.25 TB

512 14 27.0 10.8 250,000 10‐17 60000 hr 8 FC/ 6 SAS

LTO‐5 140 / 280 1.5 ‐ 3 TB 512 14 27.0 18.0 250,000 10‐17 8 FC/ 6 SAS

CO NC L U S IO N

LTO technology and longevity promise data preservation over the short‐term and the long‐term. For data that is key to your organization, tape is the proven medium for long‐term storage. LTO technology will be around for a while, and so will your data.

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ultrium/lto 6 tape drive technology

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