Beyond backup: cool applications for tape.

Magnetic tape is by far the most popular storage medium for back up and otherwise protecting data. For good reason: tape is fast and reliable, and provides huge capacity options at the best price point of any storage technology available today.

But what's news is that tape is finding its way into many exciting applications where combined with other technologies, it provides exceptional levels of performance and value to end-user organizations. Some of these areas include space and geological exploration, digital imaging, life sciences, rich media, financial services and records management.

Space and Seismic Exploration

In going "where no man has gone before" (or maybe just a few), huge amounts of data are collected for analysis, real-time decision making, and to build on the base of our combined scientific understanding. Storing and maintaining all of this data on spinning disk would be prohibitively expensive, even for U.S. Government agencies such as NASA and the USGS.

NASA's Earth Observing System (EOS) is responsible for capturing and managing the terabytes of data beamed down every day by 5 orbiting satellites, observing the land surface, oceans, biosphere and atmosphere of the Earth. This data now amounts to over 22 million files (requiring almost 2 petabytes of storage capacity) and is available to researchers around the world. To help manage this ambitious program, NASA uses library management software to provide direct storage access to a number of tape libraries containing StorageTek T9840 and T9940 tape drives. A disk system is used to provide caching and to store copies of metadata for fast searching, but all core data is stored on tape.

Rocketdyne Division of the Boeing Corporation is tasked with monitoring every aspect of the liquid-filled rockets used on each Space Shuttle mission, from assembly to preparation and fueling, to launch and recovery. During the 9 hours leading up to a launch, more than 3,000 sensors report on the condition of these rockets--25 times every second. That enormous amount of data is compared, real time, with archived copies of nominal data stored from previous launches of the same rockets, looking for anomalies that might cause an unsafe condition and result in scrubbing the launch. These archived telemetry readings are stored on Sony AIT Tape, located in a tape-automated library.

Compagnie Generale Geophysique (CGG) is one of the world's largest suppliers of seismic and geophysical data for the oil and gas exploration industry. Spurred on by customer demand to provide more detailed information faster and at lower costs, CGG adopted a storage network infrastructure and a tiered storage approach to manage their nearly 1 petabyte of data assets. Management software controls the storage and movement of data between disk arrays and a tape library containing IBM 3590 and FibreChannel LTO Ultrium tape drives. By pooling disk and tape resources, CGG's storage utilization increased dramatically as compared to their previous, direct-attached storage model, and the FC SAN has greatly increased system performance. The shared storage model has also improved data availability, as a single server failure no longer impacts data access.

Digital Imaging

The Defense Geographic Centre in the U.K. provides Britain's Armed Forces with detailed digital and hardcopy maps. Its requirement for a low-cost, high-density, high-volume digital storage system was met by Fujifilm S-AIT tape, a tape library, and management software. The Centralized Geographic Data Storage Facility (Project DALI) had to store all data objects securely, reliably ensuring confidentiality, availability, integrity and accountability. Project DALI is responsible for mapping the entire surface of the earth, with the exception of the United Kingdom. The system includes an integrated 1.4TB disk-based front end for fast retrieval of recently accessed images, with a total library capacity of 132TB.

Life Sciences

The search for cures to our most serious health problems and the records of patient treatments are generating petabytes of new data everyday. As hospitals and pharmaceutical companies experience this unprecedented growth in data, they need storage solutions that scale easily and cost-effectively. Simply throwing more disks at the problem only multiplies the costs associated with managing and protecting diverse and unconnected storage repositories.

Caprion Pharmaceutical in Montreal helps drug developers with drug discovery, as well as developing its own diagnostic and therapeutic products. It, like other companies in the field of proteomics, needed a new way of collecting, storing and analyzing vast amounts of scientific data. Caprion compares models of millions of proteins against the studies of various diseases, trying to find opportunities for new treatments, so they turned to a grid computing platform that provided the power and scalability they need now and in the future. Supporting the grid is a data warehouse consisting of a 5TB disk array and Quantum SDLT drives in a tape library to provide secure storage of their data, as well as provide fast access for their scientists and developers.

The Cardiovascular Coordination Center at the Cleveland Clinical Foundation (C5) provides clinical drug trial services to pharmaceutical companies. The creation, management and long-term archival of clinical trial data is absolutely critical to gaining FDA approval of a new therapy, and to protect the drug maker against legal or scientific challenges for years beyond the market life of the drug. So not only are reliability, capacity and performance important to C5; they also need a solution with long data retention characteristics. In looking for a storage technology that promised a long lifecycle with multiple backward-compatible upgrades, C5 decided on AIT tape and a scalable tape library.

Rich Media

Audio and video files, when digitized, can require a large amount of storage. Given that these files into the category of "fixed assets", they are not typically accessed very frequently. An automated nearline tape solution is a great fit--providing the high capacity necessary at the best available costs, while meeting the access expectations for a secondary archive repository (it's a lot faster than going to a file room and taking it off the shelf).

The Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, a non-profit organization established by Steven Spielberg, has videotaped over 50,000 interviews with survivors of the Holocaust, and using state-of-the-art digital technology, is making this incredibly important historical content available on-demand to museums, universities, and nonprofit organizations worldwide. To accomplish this, the Shoah Foundation uses a tape library equipped with AIT-2 tape drives and Imation AIT-2 tape cartridges. Management software presents the entire contents of the library as a single file system, providing users direct access.

Financial Services

We all know that banks and other financial services companies are loath to spend money unnecessarily. Finding the most cost-effective solution to any problem, especially process problems, is always a top concern when purchasing IT systems. That is why tape is becoming the solution of choice for storing many types of financial transaction and reporting information.

Landesbank Berlin realized that it could immediately save significant money and improve customer service by implementing a check imaging system. The bank was already using a tape library for a variety of storage applications and given its flexible, scalable, open architecture, they were able to add a document imaging application without any additional tape hardware.

Document and Records Management

Document imaging systems have been popular with many companies and government agencies for more than a decade. Tape is being used to fulfill this important data storage requirement for two reasons: tape capacities have continued to double every 2-3 years and outpace magnetic disk capacity using compression; and the cost advantage of tape over magnetic disk solutions is tremendous.

Landsratsamt Bodensee, the local government for 210,000 residents in the Bodensee area of Germany, has implemented an integrated RAID-TAPE server solution from DSM for use in managing drivers licenses and vehicle registration records. The system has been so successful that it has been expanded to include their water and waste management records systems. All new records are simultaneously written to the hard disk RAID and to write-once Sony AIT-3 WORM tapes in a 1.5TB library, using archive management software. The RAID provides fast access, while the tape library provides a secure, unalterable copy of the data for audit, anti-fraud and disaster-recovery purposes.

Storwave is a U.K.-based company that provides a document hosting service to its customers. Storwave's customers send their documents to Storwave for storage, protection and web-based access. To help manage the cost of all this storage and pass the savings on to their customers, Storwave utilizes a combination of RAID and a tape library equipped with AIT-3 drives. AIT-WORM media is used to prevent deletion of the document records, and provide an audit trail for modified documents. Application software provides the data management policies that control when records are migrated from the RAID to tape, while virtualizing the combined capacity to represent a large, single file system.

Summary

As the cost of tape storage continues to provide a better value proposition and capacities continue to double every couple of years, many applications are taking advantage of digital tape technology with the end result of improving the company's administration and the quality of life for everyone. Innovative solution providers are combining disk and tape to provide cost-effect systems that take full advantage of the relative strengths of both, while sacrificing nothing. It seems appropriate that disk is used for primary storage of applications and processing data, while tape provides a reliable and secure repository for the data.

The Tape Technology Council is the primary industry resource for promoting, integrating and using tape storage devices, and acts as a conduit for information exchange between manufacturers and the industry.

Rich Harada, president of the Tape technology Council, can be reached at 201-722-9890

www.tapecouncil.com

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