Most data that organizations hold is fixed content data that is unlikely to change. For cost and manageability reasons, that information should be moved to an archive. If the data is likely to serve no further operational, management or business use, but still needs to be retained for some business reason, it can be put on tape in what is called a deep archive which may very well be offline.
However, if they choose, organizations can move fixed content to an active archive which is "online" in the sense that a business user can access and manipulate data when and as necessary. Data that needs to be accessed in seconds is best kept on disk. However, much data that can be stored in an active archive - old e-mails, CAD/CAM files, medical images and movies, for example - can be stored on tape.
What about performance? That can be measured for both random access of individual records and for sequential processing. How can random access be performed on tape which is sequential? Well, robotics are used to locate a given tape and move it to a drive, which then has to find the data. Although times can vary the overall time to the first byte of data is about 1 minute 15 seconds. Not fast, but a whole lot less expensive than a disk solution. By the way, in T-Finity and similar solutions, disk storage is used as a cache so the data is fully usable at disk-quality performance.
How does performance stack up against sequential analysis, such as data mining? Surprise, tape is faster. An individual tape drive can stream data at about 140 MB per second compared to 100 MB per second for a disk drive. The bottom line is that huge data repositories will move into active archives where tape will play an important role.
Now obviously Spectra Logic seeks to replace StorageTek at the high-end, and this ambition is attainable. StorageTek is unfortunately only a shadow of its former proud self and constitutes a straw man waiting for Spectra Logic or others to strike a match. The only useful purpose for describing Sun's mismanagement of StorageTek would be to contrast it with Spectra Logic's actions over the last five years, but that sad task can be left to a Harvard Business case study. Spectra Logic now wins against StorageTek on key metrics from footprint to green computing to reliability to TCO across the board. But Spectra Logic not only wants to replace StorageTek in existing markets, it wants T-Finity to dominate the emerging market for high end tape, as well.
