History 2004: StorageTek Totally Revamps Tape Libraries

For StorageTek, the tape business is a big deal, representing nearly 80% of product sales, with at the very heart of its market, over 10,000 huge silos it has installed throughout the world for more than 20 years.

The world’s undisputed revenue leader in tape automation has announced a total of 22,000 customers for its libraries.

Since early 2004, the company has begun to renew the totality of its product line under the new name Streamline or SL, distinctly more modular.

To begin with, we saw the announcement of a high-end model, the SL8500, already shipping.

While the huge PowderHorn had only 1 robot per silo, which in no way hindered its remarkable reliability, the SL8500, designated to replace it, includes several, up to 8, each of which could stand in for another in the event of failure.

The attractively-designed machine can hold from 64 to 2,048 drives, and from 1,448 up to 300,000 cartridges, whether 9840, 9940, LTO or SDLT, but not IBM cartridges.

For the mid-range market, most likely to replace the L series, the first and most recently announced product is called the SL500, for 100-500 cartridges, LTO-2 exclusively for now, with SDLT in the works eventually.

“SL500 uses SL8500 technology,” stated StorageTek.

In fact, it looks to us like an entirely different architecture, with the exception of a few details such as the cartridge gripping system. The small robot, the heart of the entire system, is completely different. It’s a true rackmount library with a maximum of 5 interchangeable SU modules. On top is a base module with the robot enclosure, also interchangeable, 1 or 2 drives, and 30 to 50 slots. Below one can stack up to 4 expansion modules comprising either up to 4 drives and 90 additional slots, or 130 slots exclusively.

The robot, initially up high, descends to retrieve the cartridges, stored in 2 columns, one on each side, while the drives are behind. Thus you could have from 1 to 18 drives, and from 30 to 577 slots, for a maximum (native) capacity of 115TB. The upper base module has an access port for 5 cartridges, while the expansion units has a 10 media port.

No information was supplied regarding the cartridge exchange time, but it struck us as somewhat slow.

The beauty of the system, however, is the extremely low floor volume of the SL500, which allows up to 90 slots per square foot, clearly the strongest advantage over the competition (ADIC, Overland, Quantum).

Interfaces proposed include SCSI and native FC.

Unfortunately, as we went to press, no price had yet been indicated for the device.

StorageTek currently has only one tape-to-disk virtualization solution, for mainframes, VSM (Virtual Storage Manager). But an “Open VSM” is in the pipeline for its new StreamLine libraries, and may be linked to the company’s Echoview technology for real-time backup.

Sun Microsystems, StorageTek’s largest OEM, has already decided to handle the SL8500 and is expected to follow suit with the new SL500, after evaluation.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 198 on July 2004 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.