by John Webster
Executive Summary
Enterprise data center administrators continue to exploit tape for its economic information storage value. However, automated tape storage systems are traditionally bound to the enterprise data center. If tape-based information leaves the data center for deep archive purposes, it is usually by tape cartridges packed in a box and shipped to a secure off-site facility. If any of this information needs to be retrieved, it has to be found manually and shipped back to the data center. With the emergence of Big Data analytics applications that need historical data for additional context and accuracy, this practice becomes increasingly untenable.
Oracle recently announced Oracle’s Virtual Storage Manager (VSM) 7 System with the ability to transfer data natively to Oracle’s Archive Cloud. As a result, the enterprise storage administrators can use the Oracle Public Cloud as an unlimited near-line capacity extension to VSM 7 at the price of tape-based storage. Archived data can be retrieved from the cloud for emerging Big Data and IoT applications. Indeed, VSM 7 with an Oracle cloud “back end” can be seen as an immediately available repository for the huge amounts of data that an IoT application could generate, whereas disk may not be economically viable for this application.
This announcement also addresses mainframe storage administrators. Tape operations are integral to their operational practices. They can now leverage the Oracle Archive Cloud for mainframe storage to greatly improve economic efficiency while maintaining current management practices.
In this Evaluator Group Technical Insight, we explore the potential value in creating a new tape storage model for the integration of cloud-based archival storage resources with data center-based virtual tape systems. We review Oracle’s StorageTek Virtual Storage Manager 7 (VSM 7) System announcement, including new features and performance increases, value gained from its native extension to cloud-based archival storage and the expected use cases.
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