Brochure

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Brochure | HP LTO Ultrium Storage Media
Ensuring your restore is always available
With the world’s archival needs doubling every year, tape provides the perfect blend of long term,
secure and easily accessible storage. Linear Tape Open (LTO) Ultrium is the most successful
tape format and HP, with its broad portfolio of tape data cartridges and services, has been
the leader in LTO branded cartridge shipments since 2002.
How much margin for error can you aord?
Ask any IT manager, and the key issue is not ‘did my backup work successfully?’, but ‘how
certain can I be that the data will restore successfully if I need to recover the contents of
my tape?’
So how does HP ensure its storage media is always reliable? Simply by performing the most
comprehensive study of error rates, capacity and data transfer speeds that technology can
deliver. Error rates tell us how much margin there is before failure. Did the backup and restore
operation only just complete successfully, or did it have lots of margin to spare? It may not
sound severe, but bad error rate can lead directly to slower transfer rates, reduced cartridge
capacity and, in the worst case, backup or restore failure.
Poor capacity and transfer metrics have real life consequences. Reduced capacity means
more tapes are needed to backup the same amount of data. That means more cost. Slower
transfer speeds mean longer backups or backup windows being exceeded or breached,
pulling in valuable IT resource to x the issues. Again, the additional unnecessary cost can
be signicant and easily overturn any benets from choosing a cheaper tape.
How hidden costs hurt your business
Once your business is regarded as a medium-size enterprise, chances are your IT infrastructure
has grown to match. In this case, you are probably using tape automation as a means of backing
up and archiving your data. In automated environments with so many tapes in use, it may
be dicult to assess the impact of the hidden cost of poor media reliability. But just like low
inated tires can eat into the fuel economy and increase the costs of motoring, so can
sub-standard quality aect your bottom line.
Let’s assume your data store is 400,000 GB. Depending on your data and compression ratio,
you could need 500 LTO-4 tapes to store that amount of content.
A HP LTO-4 tape costs $27 and Another Brand costs $25. In total, 500 tapes from HP will
cost $13,500 versus $12,000 for the competitor.
HP testing has observed reduced capacity levels of up to 20% due to higher error rates
on non-HP tapes – e.g. edge damage, coating defects, servo-tracking issues, tribology.
But even if you were only to observe 10% capacity loss – 40,000 GB – you would still
require an additional 50 tapes to complete the archiving of all 400,000 GB if the non-HP
tape performed that badly.
When you compare the price for 500 HP tapes with 550 non-HP tapes, now the HP cost
of ownership is $1,250 lower. This dierence is the hidden cost of poor quality media
with a high error rate.
400,000 GB
500 HP LTO-4
of data storage required
tapes needed to store 400,000 GB of data
550 non-HP
tapes needed to store the same amount
of data if merely 10% of capacity is lost due
to higher error rate
$1,250
cost savings using HP branded tapes