Fighting rear-guard marketing actions – protecting a declining product or technology to keep the high-margin revenue coming in – isn’t much fun, but it sure is profitable. Especially in an area as conservative as storage. So it is a big deal when someone quits trying.
Which is why I’m so [shocked/surprised/pleased] to see Gudmundur Einarsson, CEO of Tandberg Data face reality and admit the facts in a press release:
“Using RDX QuikStor, organisations that currently rely on tape to protect, archive and interchange their data, will benefit from enhanced performance, instant random access, high reliability and, most importantly for small businesses, a lower cost than competing low-end tape solutions. . . . ”
Low-end RDX product – but can the high-end be far behind?
The RDX product packages cheap, 4200 RPM, 2.5″ disks in what T’berg calls a rugged, shockproof cartridge with a 10 year life in 40, 80 and 120 GB sizes. The unit starts at about $300, so the margins look good for T’berg and the resellers should be able to move lots to the SOHO and SMB markets.
Calling high-end tape vendors
Tandberg stresses that the RDX is a low-end system. Yet people have been predicting for years that disk would overtake tape. How close are we? As the table shows, pretty darn close.
SuperDLT IV Tape | 300 | ~$85 | $0.28 |
SATA Disk | 300 | ~$100 | $0.33 |
LTO Ultrium 3 Tape | 400 | ~$60 | $0.15 |
SATA Disk | 400 | ~$160 | $0.40 |
Alert readers will notice that DLT is much costlier than LTO, reflecting the premium tape cost that includes Quantum’s lucrative licensing fee and the inability of an aging architecture to keep up with the newer LTO. Which is why DLT is well on its way to that big archive in the sky.
I’ve also left some signifcant costs out. To put an HDD in a removable enclosure runs about $40, quantity 1. And I’ve left out the cost of the tape drive, which for these top of the line Ultrium 3 starts north of $2,000. Also, I don’t take into account the 2:1 compression manufacturers commonly assume, and that customers may or may not see.
The StorageMojo.com take
At the rate disk prices drop, this picture will look very different in 6 months, when the 1 TB drives are shipping and the industry shift to perpendicular recording is complete. And if the folks trading at Storage Markets are correct that we will see GB price parity next year, then 2.5″ will become very attractive as a backup medium when properly packaged and priced. The tape business is beginning to unwind, and while it won’t go away any time soon at the high-end, it brings almost nothing to the SOHO and SMB market space.
Expect to see the D2D data reduction companies do very well over the next three years.
Comments, as always, welcome. Moderation is turned on to keep out comment spam, and registration has been turned off to make commenting faster and easier.
Good take and I agree data reduction companies will make some coin…I’d be interested in data that illustrates how the cost of data management software is going up up up as hardware becomes more and more commoditized and prices drop. You worried about a saturated storage software market?
No offense Robin, but cost per GB tables are relatively useless. It’s like comparing the cost per cubic foot of cabin space in competing vehicles….a meaningless metric. When comparing vehicles, a meaningful metric is the operational cost per mile which includes fuel consumption, taxes, insurance, driving habits, etc.
I’m no rah-rah tape-vs-disk fanatic. I believe each media has its place, but if you’re going to make a legitimate, credible comparison, you MUST include the environmental and management costs.
Michael,
I wonder why we HAVE a storage management software market. I mean, if storage weren’t an expensive resource, why would anyone want to manage it? And why is it expensive? Partly growth of demand, yet raw storage is about 20,000 times cheaper than it was 25 years ago. So why is there so much more storage management software? My basic take is that our storage paradigm is so badly broken that we need all this stuff to keep the wheels from falling off. Which is why I like to look at new takes on the old problems, like ZFS and GFS.
Joseph,
You are correct of course. Yet IMHO the basic argument for putting up with tape is that it is significantly cheaper than disk. What sparked my comments is that Tandberg, a tape drive manufacturer, has finally stated the obvious: at the low-end their RDX disk backup is cheaper than tape. And it has all the advantages of disks: speed, random access, better shock resistance, wider environmental specs, etc.
Are there really environmental and management advantages to tape that you don’t get with disk, as your comment seems to imply? I’d love to have them sketched out.
Robin
If you ask me, both of these technologies suck. The disks are basically gramophones and the tapes…. oh, the tapes.
Both are just mechanical devices, unreliable time bombs. Come on people, it is XXI century… 16 core CPUs, LCD displays… there is got to be a better way to store data.
The disk drives have the same basic design from the 50’s, only optimized. They have moving parts! 🙂
All other computer technologies moved ahead, a lot ahead… the hard disk drives are stuck in the past.
Perpendicular recording my ^&$… we need something _NEW_, faster, cheaper, no moving parts, smaller and when it dies, it becomes read only!
I would be a very happy man when the disks are replaced with flash (or other) type of memory. I can’t stand them anymore.
If somebody ask me, what is my biggest problem in IT at the moment – unreliable storage! As simple as that.
Where I work, out of 100 IT problems probably 90 are ‘dead hard drive’ or related issue. ~60% are using laptops working from home. The current disks storage technology is pathetic.
God bless the guys from Sun for ZFS :), it is about time for some real innovations in the way we store data. More is needed… 🙂
Good evening Robin,
The following method developed by my former business partner, Dianne McAdam, would provide you with a rough estimate:
First, calculate the amount of storage required now and for the immediate future…say 3, 5 or 7 years for the sake of comparison. This should take into consideration anticipated data growth rates, as well as realistic utilization rates for disk and tape.
Next, using the figures from part one, calculate the hardware/software costs over that period. At a minimum, for tape that means the library and/or drive and cartridge costs. For disk, it means the drives, expansion units, controllers and racks.
Then add in electrical consumption (power and cooling) and floor space costs allowing for average annual increases. Obviously the overall environmental cost will vary depending on your geographic area.
That’ll give you a rough comparison. For a more thorough comparison, Dianne recommends including:
• Post-warranty maintenance costs
• Technology refresh costs (i.e., some companies replace disk every 2-3 years and tape drives every 5-7 years.).
• The cost of phasing in equipment purchases (i.e., it is not necessary to purchase all equipment in the first year. Not all of the disk controllers or tape drives and cartridges would need to be purchased the first year.)
• The cost associated with backing up data to local or remote tape or disk. This exercise assumes that only one copy of backup data exists and that additional backup copies are not stored at remote locations for disaster-recovery purposes.
• The additional cost of mirroring disk (RAID-1). Mirroring disk doubles the cost of the disk solution. Other forms of RAID protection, such as RAID-5, can provide protection against drive failures and require some additional disk capacity without doubling the cost of storage.
Using real-world current figures, she ran the numbers in late 2005 and found that tape came in at an amazing 11% the cost of an equivalent disk solution. When she presented her findings to end-users at a user group meeting in the fall they found her numbers to be, are you ready for this? – conservative.
She also ran the numbers for a hybrid tape/disk solution which offered the best of both worlds at a price that fell predictably between the cost of tape-only and disk-only solutions.
In a nutshell, if low cost is the highest priority, tape is still the logical choice. However, if quick access is more important than the overall cost of the solution, disk may be the better choice.
You’re welcome to take a look at the original analysis – send me an email. Heck, you can post the PDF on your site if you think your readers would find it useful. Though they should update the numbers with current values.
Kind regards,
Joe
In a tape vs. disk analysis, the tape proponents like to bring up space and environmental costs. With the availability of MAID (Massive Array of Idle Disks) the environmental issue is pretty much solved. When the disk(s) go idle, spin them down to save $$ on spinning them and cooling them.
Idling the disk (spin-down) also greatly enhances the lifetime of the mechanism. Instead of replacing the drive after 3 years of hard use, it gets replaced every 7 to 10 years (like tape).
Storage density is still an open issue but the relentless march of technology is solving that too. So for the next 5 years a company may need to allocate more physical space to hold the disks, chassis, controllers, etc. but over time it will shrink so the same amount of data can be stored in a given rackspace as with tape.