VTL Becomes an Academic Issue

SAN FRANCISCO -- Stanford is in the middle of a storage bake-off, and thelucky winner will get to supply virtual tape libraries to the university.

After inviting 10 vendors to respond to an RFP issued a few months ago, theuniversity's central IT department whittled the shortlist down to four: EMC,IBM, Network Appliance, and Sepaton. They've already tested IBM and NetApp;they're getting ready to beat up on EMC and Sepaton gear and expect to havenamed a contract winner before the end of the month, said Dan Stillmaker,director of storage systems at Stanford, during a session at the StorageDecisions conference here this week.

He wouldn't divulge any early results, other than to say he unplugged onevendor's box in the middle of a test run that failed to come back on once pluggedback in. He wouldn't say if it was the IBM or NetApp box. He claimed noreluctance to buy from a smaller vendor like Sepaton, if in fact the price-performance analysis favors them over the larger players involved.

The university's weighing a number of factors in its evaluation, and just recently concluded a similar bake-off for NAS gear. So while cost is always an issue, it's not the final criterion. "The biggest thing we want to be able to do is drop in the VTL without changing our current environment. We don't have time for that right now," he said.

While vendors have made 20:1 compression claims, Stillmark's a bit dubious; he said actual rates are probably closer to 4:1 -- and this is what the university's evaluation phase is about. "We want to know exactly what we'll be getting," he said.Vendors are also expressly forbidden from leaving their equipment behind after the testing's over, according to the terms of the RFP. This tactic can become a leveraging point for vendors looking to gain an inside track in the final selection, and Stanford was having none of it.

Stillmaker's got plenty of incentive to power through the testing and select a supplier. He and his 6-person department juggle more than 30,000 backup tapes, which handle the university's sizable 150 Tbytes of primary storage and more than 250 Tbytes of backup data. Backup windows get longer and longer as volumes and requirements grow from the multiple departments and schools that comprise Stillmaker's user base.

He's got plenty of company in the form of other IT departments groaning under the number of tapes they have to manage and the ever-shrinking backup windows they have. Vendors, never ones to miss a possible opening, have responded by packing VTLs with new features like data de-duplication to make that transition away from tape easier to cost-justify.

While it's easy to dismiss academic institutions as ivory-tower technology users, Stillmaker said he doesn't have a blank check where VTLs are concerned. But the business case shouldn't be difficult to make. In his first year on the job, the university ended up spending $500,000 in additional media. "We didn't get the cycling in the tapes, and it blew us up," he said.

In addition to local storage, the university also sends tapes to Iron Mountain.Stillmaker also gets charged for floor space in the data center, which get passed along to end-users via chargebacks, not always happily so. More to the point, the five tape libraries that the IT department has in the data center cost him about $200,000 annually in space charges alone. And while the libraries aren't big power consumers or heat generators, they have a large footprint. One library in particular partially blocks an air-conditioning vent; Stillmaker said the data center manager can't wait for him to decommission the hardware in favor of a smaller VTL.

One of the interesting constraints in the upgrade is the university's use of IBM's Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) for reporting and diagnostics. His backup success rate is around 98 percent, but that doesn't prevent the lucky IT staffer who goes home with the pager for backup from getting 30 or more alerts a night. The IT department is anticipating a reduction there, as well as with the amount of time devoted to backup, and its ability to create tapes offline to send to Iron Mountain.

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