Data protection warrior explains LTO & RDX
Pat Mayock is a Data Protection Warrior for HPE, and he helped us to understand where he thinks LTO & RDX (a removable disk technology) sit in the market. He explains how much tape is used today in enterprise and cloud environments, especially in the public cloud that so many think is a tapeless world. He says the cloud vendors are some of LTO's biggest customers! We talk about what LTO is good at, what it's not so good at, and what that means for how you should use it. Then we shift gears to talk about RDX, a removable disk product that has been around for roughly 15 years. It consists of a docking station and a disk-based cartridge that is built to kind of resemble a tape! Each cartridge contains a single disk drive that you can use very much like you would use a tape, except it appears as a drive letter (mounted filesystem) versus a tape drive. He explains what its target market is and how it meets a niche in the removable storage market in between removable USB disks and a standalone LTO tape drive. This is a fascinating episode you won't want to miss.
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I actually developed skills of being able to
W. Curtis Preston:reassemble the door, like to take a, to cannibalize another tape and
W. Curtis Preston:take the little door off and putting it onto a tape that I needed it on.
Pay Mayock:Yeah, I guess that's why the tape evolved.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah
W. Curtis Preston:Hi, and welcome to Backup Central's Restore it All podcast.
W. Curtis Preston:I'm your host, W.
W. Curtis Preston:Curtis Preston, AKA Mr.
W. Curtis Preston:Backup and I have with me, my vaccine side effects, counselor Prasanna
W. Curtis Preston:Malaiyandi how's it going, Prasanna?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I am not a medical doctor.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Any advice I give is should not be construed as medical advice.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Please seek professional help.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:If you need some.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I'm doing okay, Curtis, how are you
W. Curtis Preston:oh, it was a pretty as a pretty rough day yesterday.
W. Curtis Preston:I, um, and I don't know if it's, you know, because I chose to do both.
W. Curtis Preston:I got my, you know, I got my, my fourth COVID jab as well as I got
W. Curtis Preston:the second of the shingles vaccines.
W. Curtis Preston:And I got both of them at one time.
W. Curtis Preston:And it's, this is actually of, of all of the shots that I've had recently.
W. Curtis Preston:Cause you know, I get my annual flu shot and I got all the COVID shots
W. Curtis Preston:and um, Uh, and I got the shingles shot, but the first shingles shot,
W. Curtis Preston:that sounds like it shouldn't sound the way that anyway, shingles shot.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, this is the first time that I was, it just knocked me on
W. Curtis Preston:my butt and, uh, I took drugs.
W. Curtis Preston:Didn't help.
W. Curtis Preston:I just, so I just laid around and moaned and groaned.
W. Curtis Preston:So really all I could do is call my friends
Prasanna Malaiyandi:But you're feeling better, a little better.
W. Curtis Preston:I'd say I'm at about 90%, which is
W. Curtis Preston:really that's, let's be honest.
W. Curtis Preston:That's how that's,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:that's most
W. Curtis Preston:as good as I need to do to do a podcast.
W. Curtis Preston:I mean,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Oh,
W. Curtis Preston:If If I be on stage or something, that would be a problem,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Well, I'm glad you're feeling better, Curtis.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And yeah, like you said, hopefully by the end of today, you should
Prasanna Malaiyandi:be back up to a hundred percent.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, or a hundred percent of me, which is, you know, who knows
W. Curtis Preston:what that is for other people,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Your bubbly you.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Come on, Curtis
W. Curtis Preston:uh, bubbly me.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, but, uh, yeah, I, you know, I'm fully, fully support all the vaccines
W. Curtis Preston:and everything, but sometimes you get those, you get those side effects.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Well, I told you, I think we, maybe we talked about
Prasanna Malaiyandi:on the podcast, but yeah, when I got my first booster shot back during
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Thanksgiving, like we basically had to, we did it the day before Thanksgiving,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:which is the wrong time to do it.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Thanksgiving day, my wife and I, neither of us could get up.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Like I was just.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Exhausted like fever, you name it.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I had the symptoms and so we ended up postponing Thanksgiving
Prasanna Malaiyandi:dinner till the next day.
W. Curtis Preston:Druva had our, our SKO last week.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, you know, my wife wanted to get the shots last week.
W. Curtis Preston:Cause we have an upcoming trip where we going to be hanging out
W. Curtis Preston:with a bunch of family members.
W. Curtis Preston:So we wanted to get the booster and I didn't want to get it right before SKO.
W. Curtis Preston:And I'm glad, I'm glad I didn't.
W. Curtis Preston:That would have been a crappy
Prasanna Malaiyandi:That would have been miserable
W. Curtis Preston:uh, speaking of Druva, uh, Prasanna and I work for different
W. Curtis Preston:companies and, uh, I work for Druva.
W. Curtis Preston:He works for Zoom, and this is not a podcast of either company.
W. Curtis Preston:Any opinions that you hear are ours
Prasanna Malaiyandi:or Curtis's really
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W. Curtis Preston:Um, and, uh, also if you, you know, if you have something to say in
W. Curtis Preston:this space, backup recovery archive, uh, cybersecurity, ransomware
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W. Curtis Preston:So let, uh, let us get on to our guest.
W. Curtis Preston:He is, uh, been in the data protection space for longer than
W. Curtis Preston:I have, which is saying something.
W. Curtis Preston:And, um, having worked at a number of, uh, companies and he is now,
W. Curtis Preston:I love, this is actually what made me invite him on the podcast.
W. Curtis Preston:I was looking on LinkedIn and his title says data protection
W. Curtis Preston:warrior, I love that title.
W. Curtis Preston:I may just steal that title.
W. Curtis Preston:The heck with Mr.
W. Curtis Preston:Backup, I'm going to go with data protection, warrior, uh, and
W. Curtis Preston:Crusader of LTO tape and RDX that.
W. Curtis Preston:Welcome to the podcast, Patrick
Pay Mayock:Thank you very much for inviting me, uh,
Pay Mayock:looking forward to the podcast.
W. Curtis Preston:And, uh, and actually I should call you pat right now, Patrick,
Pay Mayock:That's right Make it Pat.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah, no problem.
W. Curtis Preston:So welcome.
W. Curtis Preston:Welcome to the podcast, Pat.
W. Curtis Preston:And, uh, I think the first thing we have to get off the, off the,
W. Curtis Preston:off the table here is that whatever that is behind you, because it looks
Pay Mayock:So I grew up, uh, all over the United States, but spent most
Pay Mayock:of my time in Southern California.
Pay Mayock:Um, and actually right in Aliso beach where these, this sport began.
Pay Mayock:That's a skim board, basically.
Pay Mayock:It's, I've been making these since I was a kid.
Pay Mayock:I got out to Colorado.
Pay Mayock:I still take vacations and I still make them on, take them with me and
Pay Mayock:then, uh, for friends and family.
Pay Mayock:So they'll give me a call and say, Hey, we're now in Florida.
Pay Mayock:Can you help me out?
Pay Mayock:So yeah, I still make them and they're pretty fun.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So for people who may not be
Prasanna Malaiyandi:familiar, what's a skim board?
Pay Mayock:So, especially in Southern California, the beaches are steep.
Pay Mayock:Okay.
Pay Mayock:And the water is cold.
Pay Mayock:So the water comes up and splashes back down, you run across the
Pay Mayock:shoreline, as the water is going down.
Pay Mayock:If you're good, you throw the board, jump on it and slide down.
Pay Mayock:If you're really good, you slide down towards the incoming wave and
Pay Mayock:it's a, it's a short break and you come up it and you come back down.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Um,
Pay Mayock:And it's, it's an amazing sport.
Pay Mayock:I can't do that.
Pay Mayock:I can sort of go horizontal maybe three or four times.
Pay Mayock:So they've got to stop and sit down, but that skimboarding
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Gotcha.
W. Curtis Preston:And so it's got no fins or anything that would be,
Pay Mayock:nothing.
Pay Mayock:Yeah, no fins.
Pay Mayock:It's flat, a little bit of a, of a spoon to it.
Pay Mayock:And, uh, yeah, it's a lot of fun.
W. Curtis Preston:Amazing.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, I actually, I, I, I think I've seen that some, cause I, you know, I live in
W. Curtis Preston:Southern California, but I don't spend, I don't spend enough time at the beach,
W. Curtis Preston:but I I've seen that, but I, I don't know.
W. Curtis Preston:I don't think I knew what I was looking at.
Pay Mayock:Yeah,
W. Curtis Preston:But, uh, but you, you are a, I guess, an avid
W. Curtis Preston:skim boarder to the point of actually making your own skim boards
Pay Mayock:that's about it.
W. Curtis Preston:and you live in, you know, a little far from the
Pay Mayock:A little far, but, uh, I've been here for 20 years.
Pay Mayock:I love Denver.
Pay Mayock:I love, uh, it works out well for business because you can
Pay Mayock:get anywhere you want to get to.
Pay Mayock:We've got all the weather, sometimes all the weather in the same day, but
Pay Mayock:we have all the weather, so it's good.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:I've spent quite a bit of time in and around Boulder and Denver and, um, having
W. Curtis Preston:visited a lot of the, you know, the tape companies that tend to be out there.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and I, I ha I have some pictures of what is, what is now an abandoned
W. Curtis Preston:factory or whatever, you know, the, the tape drive right out there.
W. Curtis Preston:W what that used to be StorageTek facilities, right.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:I've got some really good photos of the, of the street signs for Tape Drive, but
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I used to work on Tape Drive,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:visit the office, used to visit the campus out there.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So at my, one of my prior employers, EMC had a office on
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Tape Drive right off Tape Drive.
W. Curtis Preston:Interesting.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:those factories that you probably have pictures of.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:But I think when I went out there, it was just like an abandoned field.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I think all those factories were
Prasanna Malaiyandi:gone.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah, it's pretty.
W. Curtis Preston:I'll let, um, pat, has anything
W. Curtis Preston:happened out
W. Curtis Preston:there
Pay Mayock:No, no, they moved on obviously, uh, the land's got a lot of
Pay Mayock:value, but for now it's still a empty lot.
W. Curtis Preston:Hmm.
W. Curtis Preston:Hey, you know, anybody looking for some, for some manufacturing facilities
W. Curtis Preston:go, uh, plenty of land out there is, is it that is Boulder, right?
Pay Mayock:Yes, it is just as you come down the hill, it's off to your right.
Pay Mayock:It's a great location.
W. Curtis Preston:Right, right.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, and you can, you have access to Pat, so, but Pat, you have a job.
W. Curtis Preston:You work actually for hPE, right?
Pay Mayock:That's correct.
Pay Mayock:So I'm a, I'm a business partner manager.
Pay Mayock:I work with our, uh, HPE partners to help them sell more, you know, tape media,
Pay Mayock:tape libraries, the whole business of data protection, but focusing on currently
Pay Mayock:focusing on the tape media, uh, the RDX product, which is a little bit unique.
Pay Mayock:Uh, and then helping out with tape libraries.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I'm going to ask the obvious question just because
Prasanna Malaiyandi:most of our listeners are probably like isn't tape dead and I'm sure
Prasanna Malaiyandi:we're going to talk about that.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Just playing.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I know we've had a lot of podcasts episodes talking about tape, but
Prasanna Malaiyandi:just for all the listeners who may not have heard some of our past
Prasanna Malaiyandi:episodes, uh, pat, maybe you could give
Prasanna Malaiyandi:your
W. Curtis Preston:you just, you just hurt my heart
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I know.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So, so this is me channeling our listeners
Pay Mayock:So it's interesting because I, I started out selling nine track tape
Pay Mayock:way back when the reels I've got one over here, but so that tapes around for
Pay Mayock:a long time, it had a 20 year lifespan and then tape moved on to all types of
Pay Mayock:technologies, competing technologies.
Pay Mayock:Each one, each new evolution had a better capacity, a better throughput
Pay Mayock:working on better quality, all those goals, but it was a competition.
Pay Mayock:And so you'd walk into a company and they had one of each okay.
Pay Mayock:Or 20 of each types of technology back in the day, DLT AIT, eight
Pay Mayock:millimeter, a bunch that moved on to a group, the LTO group, and
Pay Mayock:sort of solidified on a standard.
Pay Mayock:Multiple manufacturers, all designing the specifications around
Pay Mayock:the cartridge, the media, the tape drive, all those components.
Pay Mayock:And it's a group effort.
Pay Mayock:We do compete, but it's a group effort.
Pay Mayock:So it allows some stability in the marketplace to continually
Pay Mayock:bring out the next evolution.
Pay Mayock:The next level of, of technology.
Pay Mayock:Um, but as a group.
Pay Mayock:Okay.
Pay Mayock:So if someone has a preference for ABC company, they can buy it from ABC or XYZ.
Pay Mayock:They all work together.
Pay Mayock:Um, and nowadays the, the short answer is tape is as fast or faster than disk.
Pay Mayock:I like saying that
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Hmm.
Pay Mayock:it's got a longer shelf life, meaning you can
Pay Mayock:store data for about 30 years.
Pay Mayock:Disk can't do that.
Pay Mayock:It is better for the environment because you can store so much capacity of data
Pay Mayock:in a very small space that it saves on, you know, data center, um, resources.
Pay Mayock:Okay.
Pay Mayock:If you could put all your data on a disc, that'd be great, but it would
Pay Mayock:cost so much in terms of space for those systems for power, for cooling.
Pay Mayock:And so I smiled because.
Pay Mayock:Data is growing so fast.
Pay Mayock:The most cost effective way to store large amounts of data
Pay Mayock:for long purposes is on tape.
Pay Mayock:It's not going to go away.
Pay Mayock:And then specifically your HPE, my brand of tape can fit in anybody's
Pay Mayock:tape drive in anybody's tape library.
Pay Mayock:So all these companies that are creating this content.
Pay Mayock:I have to put that data somewhere safely.
Pay Mayock:And it's not really an argument because you look at the actual data and say, oh,
Pay Mayock:well, it's the cost and where to do this.
Pay Mayock:This makes sense.
Pay Mayock:So again, I smile a lot.
Pay Mayock:It's a good, it's a good marketplace.
Pay Mayock:And I never, I never used that phrase,
Pay Mayock:you know, because it's been around forever and I just, you know,
Pay Mayock:I, I just can't see that phrase.
Pay Mayock:You mentioned the unknown
Pay Mayock:reigns.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:I think that when you look at tape versus disc about the only thing that
W. Curtis Preston:disc is better at is random access.
W. Curtis Preston:Right?
W. Curtis Preston:Um, I mean, tape, it has.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, uh, error rate, right?
W. Curtis Preston:It has a longer storage time.
W. Curtis Preston:It, uh, power, power consumption is, is vastly different.
W. Curtis Preston:In fact, I remember, uh, years ago writing a thing that talked about
W. Curtis Preston:the fact that even if disk were free, the tape would still be cheaper
W. Curtis Preston:because of the power savings over
W. Curtis Preston:time.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah, and it's not so great at random access, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Oddly enough, it can do random access.
W. Curtis Preston:We have the darn it.
W. Curtis Preston:LTFS.
Pay Mayock:Oh, LTF.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:So you, you can make an LTO tape look like a file system.
W. Curtis Preston:It will be the slowest performing random access file system you've
W. Curtis Preston:ever used, but it will work.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, but I w I wouldn't use it for that.
W. Curtis Preston:Like, as a, as a human interacting with that, you would not want to do that.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:But it can do that.
W. Curtis Preston:Why would someone use LTFS over.
W. Curtis Preston:Just storing something on LTO tape.
Pay Mayock:Uh, it is, as you say, a better way of organizing
Pay Mayock:the data on physical tape, so you can get to it faster.
Pay Mayock:And there are multiple data management software packages out
Pay Mayock:there that take advantage of that.
Pay Mayock:So that when you and I click on a video online somewhere, that's probably coming
Pay Mayock:off a tape somewhere to a disc and being stationed there for multiple access.
Pay Mayock:But it's coming off tape because they can't keep everything on disc.
Pay Mayock:I mean, like you said, if this was free, When you look at the new, uh,
Pay Mayock:stories of datacenters being put in by all these major corporations, a
Pay Mayock:lot of them social media, the size of those facilities is, is unbelievable.
Pay Mayock:If it was all disk, it would be three times bigger.
Pay Mayock:Okay.
Pay Mayock:Me just physical space.
Pay Mayock:There's just a better ability to put data on tape than on disk for those reasons.
W. Curtis Preston:Which reminds me of something that I, all that I also say
W. Curtis Preston:rather frequently, which is, I think if the average person saw what the
W. Curtis Preston:average build of these large social media companies were in these cloud companies.
W. Curtis Preston:They would be very surprised by the amount of tape in those environments.
W. Curtis Preston:Wouldn't you say?
Pay Mayock:Right.
Pay Mayock:Right.
Pay Mayock:But people like my family will come up to me and say, but dad, what
Pay Mayock:about, uh, what about the cloud?
Pay Mayock:You're gonna lose your job!
Pay Mayock:And the answer is.
Pay Mayock:The cloud has a lot of tape in it.
Pay Mayock:They're our best customers, because for cost reasons, they can't keep
Pay Mayock:all of your documentation, all of your images and all that on disc.
Pay Mayock:They're trying to be businesspeople.
Pay Mayock:And they look at the scale and the speeds and yeah, there's a, there's a lot of
Pay Mayock:room for growth in the, in the LTO market.
Pay Mayock:Uh, and the tape market definitely.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:It's an interesting point.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:You made Pat, which I hadn't, I, it should have dawned on me, but it wasn't obvious
Prasanna Malaiyandi:is your video streaming example, right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Where people are accessing video on demand or whatever else.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And the companies themselves are storing it on tape.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Like that never came across to me as, yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:That is probably the most likely method that they're doing.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Just like you said, for cost reasons.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I'm sure there is, like, you mentioned like buffering and other things to make
Prasanna Malaiyandi:sure that it performs well once the first copies read, but yeah, keeping that stuff
Prasanna Malaiyandi:on tape probably makes the most sense.
Pay Mayock:If you look at, and there's multiple stories, uh, in
Pay Mayock:the market, one in areas, you know, media, entertainment and sports.
Pay Mayock:of those games and that kind of a smile, all those games you're being
Pay Mayock:recorded, multiple angles, and they're being kept for five, 10 years.
Pay Mayock:So that a, a news, uh, sports center can say, well, let's get a recap of all the
Pay Mayock:games that, that Bob Smith played in.
Pay Mayock:They ask the question, it goes out, it goes onto the tape libraries
Pay Mayock:to access all the information.
Pay Mayock:They need, load up the tapes, download whatever copies they need and boom,
Pay Mayock:they have a full story of all that data and they just can't do it.
Pay Mayock:I shouldn't say can't, but you can't do it physically on disk
Pay Mayock:because of the comparison and capacities and power and cooling.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:I I'd say the other, you know, earlier I said the, the, the, uh, the one
W. Curtis Preston:thing that disk could do better, the other thing disc can do better, which
W. Curtis Preston:I, which I probably should've also mentioned is the ability to go any speed.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, which, which really became, I think the primary problem that tape
W. Curtis Preston:experienced in the backup space, right.
W. Curtis Preston:It certainly was for me.
W. Curtis Preston:And it's why, why we started using things like multiplexing, which is, um, you
W. Curtis Preston:know, it's, it, it was a necessary evil.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, and you know, we, we, we had, um, a Ricky Martin from NetApp
W. Curtis Preston:that was talking about that.
W. Curtis Preston:And he was just talking about, he just referred to it as just evil.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:You just see I'm like, well, it's a necessary evil back in the day because
W. Curtis Preston:tape was not good at going slow.
W. Curtis Preston:It, I don't think it's got any better at going slow these days than it was before.
W. Curtis Preston:And so that's why it became problematic in backup and recovery.
W. Curtis Preston:And we used multiplexing for a while to sort of create, I dunno, a buffer zone
W. Curtis Preston:there, if you will, but it was such a bad thing in that it made backups.
W. Curtis Preston:Okay.
W. Curtis Preston:But it made restores worse.
W. Curtis Preston:But that's why I think tape really went down, uh, in the backup space.
W. Curtis Preston:But what has happened is what you're talking about is tape being used in the
W. Curtis Preston:primary and secondary storage spaces.
W. Curtis Preston:Not as much in the backup space.
W. Curtis Preston:Um,
Pay Mayock:So even on the team that I work with, we do argue, we talk
Pay Mayock:about new marketing ideas and what we should be focusing and some say.
Pay Mayock:Uh, it's all about backup and data protection.
Pay Mayock:Um, and then others say, no, no, no, it's all about archive.
Pay Mayock:Okay.
Pay Mayock:There was what are our strengths?
Pay Mayock:Um, and again, you can store on flash.
Pay Mayock:You can store on disc, you can store on tape, you got choices.
Pay Mayock:Um, but on the backup side, you know, for all the current, uh, newsworthy
Pay Mayock:issues we're having with ransomware, the idea to copy all your data.
Pay Mayock:then take that copy and take it off the network.
Pay Mayock:They talk about offline air gap, um, and it's easy to do with tape.
Pay Mayock:So it's a copy, but once it's put onto the tape moves onto
Pay Mayock:the, into the slot, it's offline.
Pay Mayock:If they break into your network, it's pretty hard to get to the content on tape.
Pay Mayock:it's hard to get to the content on tape because it's not on-line.
Pay Mayock:And then you make two copies and one goes off site.
Pay Mayock:So for backup, that's just a, a huge boom, hate to say it for tape
Pay Mayock:because of those two features.
Pay Mayock:Get it offline and get it off site.
Pay Mayock:It's easy.
Pay Mayock:The bigger one, as you said is for archive.
Pay Mayock:I shouldn't say bigger, but the other one is for archive
Pay Mayock:because there's so much content.
Pay Mayock:I saw a note today, uh, from, uh, IDC talking about 40% growth.
Pay Mayock:Across all companies per year,
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
Pay Mayock:so per year.
Pay Mayock:So that data that you created a year ago, you're required to keep it maybe
Pay Mayock:has value for engineering purposes or for legal reasons or for content,
Pay Mayock:but you want to get it off your high powered high-performance disc systems
Pay Mayock:and get it off site and get it offline.
Pay Mayock:And then when you need it, you can get to it.
W. Curtis Preston:We've had a couple of guests on the podcast that have talked
W. Curtis Preston:about, they're basically exactly what you're saying, that, that it's hard to
W. Curtis Preston:beat a tape when it comes to ransomware.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:That it's all it's, it's purely offline, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Completely offline.
Pay Mayock:If I could jump in, one concept of tape is to make a copy and send
Pay Mayock:it off to someplace like iron mountain.
Pay Mayock:That's great.
Pay Mayock:There's some issues regarding your recovery time, your cost
Pay Mayock:to keep it there, et cetera, but it is a great fail safe because.
Pay Mayock:Iron mountain and other companies like that have very secure environments.
Pay Mayock:In some cases, they're actually under a mountain.
Pay Mayock:And so your data, if it's critical for you for a 10 year
Pay Mayock:storage of data, that's awesome.
Pay Mayock:Very well protected.
Pay Mayock:Another blend is to have onsite data on your own tape library system.
Pay Mayock:And then a second copy either in the cloud or at a second facility.
Pay Mayock:That is, has a duplicate system set up.
Pay Mayock:And so when you talk about disaster recovery, it's not just ransomware,
Pay Mayock:it could be an actual natural, uh, effect on your own building,
Pay Mayock:you know, hurricanes, et cetera.
Pay Mayock:So again, you have local access if it's an attack, uh, but you have a
Pay Mayock:second site so that if you lose your facility, for whatever reason, you've
Pay Mayock:got all your data somewhere else.
W. Curtis Preston:I like to use things like for what they're really good at.
W. Curtis Preston:And I do think that tape is really good at this at holding, you know, large
W. Curtis Preston:amounts of data for long periods of time, and also being able to cheaply create
W. Curtis Preston:another copy that I can store wherever.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, so I, and there are technologies.
W. Curtis Preston:To have two tape libraries replicating between each other.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:So that we don't have to continually be shipping tapes back and forth.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, And, and that's why I think when I go to, it's been, it's been a couple of
W. Curtis Preston:years for, for obvious reasons since I've been to NAB and I didn't go this time.
W. Curtis Preston:I was, I was a little busy, but NAB was just last week.
W. Curtis Preston:The national association of broadcasters, for those of you that don't follow that.
W. Curtis Preston:And there's a huge interest in tape, in the broadcast space.
W. Curtis Preston:For exactly what you're talking about.
W. Curtis Preston:The broadcast and entertainment spaces.
W. Curtis Preston:They create a ridiculous amount of data very quickly, and then they
W. Curtis Preston:want to store all of it forever.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Just
Prasanna Malaiyandi:imagine the Olympics and taking like eight K video.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And that's an enormous amount of data for how many weeks, and now you want to
Prasanna Malaiyandi:store it because in like four years or whatever else, you're going to want to
Prasanna Malaiyandi:be able to pull up those clips again.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Are you going to store it all on disc?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Probably not.
Pay Mayock:Probably not.
W. Curtis Preston:So, uh, but let's take it, but let's take a turn.
W. Curtis Preston:So we talked about tape for awhile.
W. Curtis Preston:You have another technology, which is not tape, which, um, I, I ha
W. Curtis Preston:I don't see a lot about lately.
W. Curtis Preston:In fact, I actually thought it had, I apologize, but I thought
W. Curtis Preston:it had gone by the wayside.
W. Curtis Preston:And when I saw that in your bio, I said, Hey, we've got to get
W. Curtis Preston:Pat on to talk to us about RDX.
W. Curtis Preston:So first off, why don't you describe what RDX is.
Pay Mayock:Sure.
Pay Mayock:I'm looking around the room here.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:It's not the car by the way.
Pay Mayock:Pardon me?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Speaker:It's not the car, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Speaker:It's not the acura rDX.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:
Speaker:Exactly.
Pay Mayock:No.
Pay Mayock:No.
Pay Mayock:So, so you mentioned Boulder.
Pay Mayock:I believe the company was called pro store developed a technology in Boulder for RDX,
Pay Mayock:and they developed it for awhile and then sold the rights to multiple companies.
Pay Mayock:Um, like, like Tandberg, for instance, uh, Tandberg Overland, and it's, it's used
Pay Mayock:by Dell, HPE and other companies today.
Pay Mayock:Um, to put out in the marketplace, in a nutshell, it
Pay Mayock:is a disc drive and a cartridge.
Pay Mayock:So it looks similar to this, but it's actually a disc drive and it
Pay Mayock:has a small docking station, usually USB attached and same concept.
Pay Mayock:I want a copy of my data.
Pay Mayock:I want to be able to eject it and then throw it into a safe, or take
Pay Mayock:it off site to a secure facility or send it securely to somebody else
Pay Mayock:and have them load it for themselves.
Pay Mayock:So it's disc in a cartridge, um, been around for, oh gosh, I'm getting old,
Pay Mayock:more than 15 years, uh, is still quite popular in some of the workstations
Pay Mayock:that are put out by HP and HPE, uh, like the ProLiant, um, where someone has a
Pay Mayock:series of disks and all their content.
Pay Mayock:And as an engineer, they say, or a creative person, they say, give
Pay Mayock:me a copy and I want it on disc.
Pay Mayock:Okay.
Pay Mayock:So they just pop it up.
Pay Mayock:And again, this portable, et cetera, same kinds of, uh, or similar
Pay Mayock:advantages to tape, uh, what I do with both, you know, if I get to an
Pay Mayock:a stage, I just throw them because the RDX disk cartridge is designed
Pay Mayock:to take an impact of like three feet.
Pay Mayock:And I usually just throw it though.
Pay Mayock:Um, so it's a different level than say a standard USB, uh, external drive.
Pay Mayock:Uh, it's designed for somebody who's moving a lot of data off an on disk.
Pay Mayock:Okay.
Pay Mayock:Um, one example I thought of as the, uh, uh, law enforcement offices evolved
Pay Mayock:into body cams and, uh, surveillance cameras, um, and cameras mounted
Pay Mayock:on, on the police cars, a normal it environment had to jump a factor of 10.
Pay Mayock:Like a factor of 10 to maintain all that data and you can do it with USB drives.
Pay Mayock:Uh, but you can also do with a more secure product called RDX.
W. Curtis Preston:So it, it's bringing some of the functionality
W. Curtis Preston:of tape to desk, if you will, or it's basically making, making tape.
W. Curtis Preston:Look like disk, what does it actually look like when you, when you put a cartridge
W. Curtis Preston:in, does it show up as a drive letter or.
Pay Mayock:Yep.
Pay Mayock:Sure.
Pay Mayock:It looks like a disc drive.
Pay Mayock:It is a disc drive.
Pay Mayock:Okay.
Pay Mayock:So, and for some people, again, depending on your environment, um,
Pay Mayock:retail businesses, they can use tape.
Pay Mayock:And a lot of times they used to use the four millimeter dat.
Pay Mayock:Okay.
Pay Mayock:As their daily backup for all their, uh, uh, POS environment.
Pay Mayock:And that worked just fine.
Pay Mayock:The technology went away and so they were asking, well, what else is there?
Pay Mayock:A disk in a cartridge is very easy for each individual retail store.
Pay Mayock:And imagine all those stores out there to just each act, it
Pay Mayock:toss it in the safe every night.
Pay Mayock:It's a very secure way of keeping a copy of all those transactions.
Pay Mayock:Um, and again, every customer says tape or disk, you know,
Pay Mayock:what, what makes sense for me?
Pay Mayock:We all have a preference.
Pay Mayock:uh, at some point the capacity benefits of tape, they can get cheap for storing data
Pay Mayock:outweigh the capacity and the cost for RDX, but for one terabyte to five terabyte
Pay Mayock:environments, it has a great play.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Is there a reason though?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Someone wouldn't just use like an external portable hard drive or
Prasanna Malaiyandi:another mechanism like
Prasanna Malaiyandi:that
Pay Mayock:So, do you have one of those at
Pay Mayock:home?
Pay Mayock:You must have one.
Pay Mayock:Yeah, so I do too.
Pay Mayock:Okay.
Pay Mayock:So I back up my stuff, I do a, a USB drive if I was doing that and
Pay Mayock:unplugging it every single day.
Pay Mayock:Okay.
Pay Mayock:At some point that's not what it's designed for.
Pay Mayock:Okay.
Pay Mayock:Just the mere fact of plugging it in and plugging it out.
Pay Mayock:That USB, if it's always plugged in or plugged in once
Pay Mayock:a month and you do your backup.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:that's fine.
Pay Mayock:But individuals who are going through five 10 of
Pay Mayock:these external drives and plugging them in for different reasons.
Pay Mayock:It makes more sense to have a docking stations that is designed for anti-static.
Pay Mayock:Um, human beings just shoving it in.
Pay Mayock:Okay.
Pay Mayock:And all the security you need for that kind of multiple volumes being
Pay Mayock:stored on multiple cartridges.
Pay Mayock:Okay.
Pay Mayock:And it's all plugged in once, either internal or external.
Pay Mayock:So it's just a different level.
Pay Mayock:Um,
W. Curtis Preston:By the way, your earlier comment, it
W. Curtis Preston:gave me multiple flashbacks.
W. Curtis Preston:I just wanted to tell you that, uh, when, when you mentioned retail and you
W. Curtis Preston:mentioned DAT drives because, uh, I cut my teeth, uh, like the, the most popular
W. Curtis Preston:tape drive that I spent a lot of my time in, early at Deezer HP nine thousands.
W. Curtis Preston:I don't know if you remember the HB 9,000 series, but, um, I had, I had
W. Curtis Preston:an army of those on my data center and we had the DDS one and the DDS
W. Curtis Preston:two drives and, uh, those things.
W. Curtis Preston:Just a big thing with them was to not drop them.
W. Curtis Preston:Cause they were, they were good tape dries, but if you drop that tape
W. Curtis Preston:from a height of like, you know me, that it would go shattering, right?
W. Curtis Preston:The, the, the door would go shattering.
W. Curtis Preston:And, uh, I actually got, I actually developed skills
W. Curtis Preston:of being able to reassemble.
W. Curtis Preston:The door, like to take a, to cannibalize another tape and take
W. Curtis Preston:the little door off and putting it onto a tape that I needed it
W. Curtis Preston:on.
Pay Mayock:Yeah, I guess that's why the tape evolved.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah, I, well, cause LTO is, is by comparison or by contrast
W. Curtis Preston:is much more, uh, You know, rigid, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, it handles and later generations of LTO are more rigid than earlier.
W. Curtis Preston:Generations of LTO.
W. Curtis Preston:In fact, I, I have this information from a very different
W. Curtis Preston:standpoint than most people.
W. Curtis Preston:I actually was making a music video where, um, we shattered.
W. Curtis Preston:Tapes against, there was just one shot that I wanted and
W. Curtis Preston:we did it in slow motion.
W. Curtis Preston:And, uh, we wanted to shatter an LTO tape against the wall and we wanted
W. Curtis Preston:it to hit the wall and then explode.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:And it turned out it was impossible to make that shot.
W. Curtis Preston:And they only, because it wouldn't do it.
W. Curtis Preston:And, uh, no matter how hard we throw it.
W. Curtis Preston:And so what I ended up having to do was to disassemble the
W. Curtis Preston:cartridge, check out all the screws.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:And then tape it together, put, put scotch tape on the outside so that, so
W. Curtis Preston:that, uh, when we throw it against the wall, it would, uh, so like I said, it's
W. Curtis Preston:a very different, the average person has not tried to destroy, uh, uh, uh, a tape
W. Curtis Preston:for, um, you know, for a music video.
W. Curtis Preston:So what, what, so the, the use of RDX that you talked about, I heard
W. Curtis Preston:you talk about retail environments.
W. Curtis Preston:What are other places that people are using them?
W. Curtis Preston:What are other things that people are using them for?
Pay Mayock:I hate to limit it because it really comes down to, you
Pay Mayock:know, what are your requirements.
Pay Mayock:But I'll try, I'll start with that.
Pay Mayock:If you're an environment where you're working on.
Pay Mayock:One terabyte to say five terabytes of data.
Pay Mayock:Okay.
Pay Mayock:On a regular basis, you need a backup.
Pay Mayock:You need something rugged.
Pay Mayock:Um, RDX might be used for, you know, laptop environment where
Pay Mayock:scientists are going out into the field and analyzing, uh, uh, the
Pay Mayock:data from either Marine or geological information and they need something.
Pay Mayock:They can back up their laptop.
Pay Mayock:And then putting their, their briefcase and come back when the
Pay Mayock:field and have the data secure.
Pay Mayock:Okay.
Pay Mayock:It's used on, I've seen applications in oil exploration vessels, and
Pay Mayock:that's an amazing technology where they go out and they troll with all
Pay Mayock:these sensors and gather all this data from the ground under the water.
Pay Mayock:It's so much data, but they're on a ship.
Pay Mayock:And so once they collect it, they want to be able to securely, put it on something.
Pay Mayock:And the it person says I need all LTO, the appar it person says,
Pay Mayock:I need all RDX again, a choice.
Pay Mayock:Okay.
Pay Mayock:Uh, for what they see is more beneficial for their environment.
Pay Mayock:So there's some big scale type applications.
Pay Mayock:Uh, but the smallest scale is someone who is a content creator at home.
Pay Mayock:And you walk in their office and they've got multiple USB drives at different
Pay Mayock:sizes, and they've knocked some off the table and they've lost content there.
Pay Mayock:They need to hear about RDX and I'll admit it's not a well talked about product.
Pay Mayock:Um, but it has a great application.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I was even thinking, as you're talking about the
Prasanna Malaiyandi:content creators, even probably people photographers, videographers, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:The people in the field taking 4k video and things like that.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:For the most part, I think they end up just throwing them onto SSD drives.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Portable hard drives, but like you mentioned, right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:They're not always the most robust right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:In all situations and things like that.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And so maybe that could potentially be another use case as
Pay Mayock:Exactly.
W. Curtis Preston:I would assume.
W. Curtis Preston:Well, I I'm, I I'm going to assume, but you can verify or, or, or disagree the,
W. Curtis Preston:the, the bay, the docking station, it's less expensive than an LTO tape drive.
W. Curtis Preston:I'm assuming.
. Pay Mayock:So you think about RDX and RDX as a removable cartridge
. Pay Mayock:that has a disc drive in it.
. Pay Mayock:I guess the key thing to think about is that majority of the
. Pay Mayock:technology is here in the cartridge.
. Pay Mayock:Okay.
. Pay Mayock:It's a disk drive in a very well-designed case that has some anti-static issues.
. Pay Mayock:Um, allows you to plug it in and plug it out multiple times without destroying
. Pay Mayock:any connectors and the docking station.
. Pay Mayock:Okay.
. Pay Mayock:To be blunt, it's pretty low technology.
. Pay Mayock:Okay.
. Pay Mayock:It's got the cord going into the system and it might be internal.
. Pay Mayock:Um, but it's very low cost.
. Pay Mayock:So as we evolve through technology and someone said, I've got my
. Pay Mayock:four millimeter dat technology backing up my office environment.
. Pay Mayock:And I can't find L a DAT tapes anymore.
. Pay Mayock:I can't find 4 mm tapes anymore and there, and they search and they pay a
. Pay Mayock:lot of money for those tapes because they don't want to change their system.
. Pay Mayock:One of the first issues they worry about going to the next level of tape
. Pay Mayock:technology is that it might be over $500 over a thousand dollars over
. Pay Mayock:$3,000 for a brand new LTO tape drive.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
Pay Mayock:Without getting in trouble, a docking station under $250.
Pay Mayock:And they transition to this technology.
Pay Mayock:And in that environment, that cost to change technology is quite low.
Pay Mayock:And then they have, you know, the current disc drive in a
Pay Mayock:cartridge meets their needs.
W. Curtis Preston:So it sounds like the, the docking station is less expensive.
W. Curtis Preston:The quick look, I, the quick search that I did, it shows that the
W. Curtis Preston:media is more expensive than LTO.
W. Curtis Preston:Which makes sense, given all of the, the technology that's in there, just
W. Curtis Preston:like, you know what you talked about.
Pay Mayock:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:that is something that a potential customer needs to weigh out.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, in terms of, do I want a more expensive tape drive that will have, uh,
W. Curtis Preston:you know, less expensive media, it depends on how many of those you're buying.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:And, and like you said, if, if, if you need, cause it was like,
W. Curtis Preston:it was around 500 bucks for, uh, for a five terabyte cartridge
W. Curtis Preston:that I, at least my quick search.
W. Curtis Preston:Whereas something like that with LTO is, is a hundred bucks or less, right?
W. Curtis Preston:So it just going to different different people are going
W. Curtis Preston:to find both of those useful.
W. Curtis Preston:I would think.
Pay Mayock:Exactly and that, and that is again, the customer makes the decision
Pay Mayock:based on what their data is, uh, what their concept is about disk or tape.
Pay Mayock:Um, and then, like you said, the docking stations for RDX is very low cost to step
Pay Mayock:into, um, as opposed to a tape drive.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yeah.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:The one question I had for you Pat, was I know we talked earlier about LTFS
Prasanna Malaiyandi:and giving you sort of random access for data that's stored on LTO tapes.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I'm guessing with RDX because it is disc, right?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Your random access performance.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Everything else would be significantly better than tape.
Pay Mayock:Right.
Pay Mayock:In my mind, if I was a content creator and I have a drone,
Pay Mayock:by the way, I love my drone.
Pay Mayock:I've got a lot of grandkids.
Pay Mayock:I love chasing around the house, you know, or outside.
Pay Mayock:All that content I can put on an RDX and load it and access it and use
Pay Mayock:it and play with it and then take it out, put it back on the shelf.
Pay Mayock:And let's just call that summertime 2022.
Pay Mayock:Okay.
Pay Mayock:Um, with tape, I wouldn't be able to do that quite as easy.
Pay Mayock:I would take the content out, download it when I want to play
Pay Mayock:with it and then put it back on.
Pay Mayock:So for different environments, It's an advantage to have a, a disc based system.
Pay Mayock:Okay.
Pay Mayock:As opposed to a tape based system.
Pay Mayock:That's all
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Makes sense.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Like Curtis was saying, I think the different use cases, right.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:You have to look and see, what is your use case?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:What are your requirements?
Prasanna Malaiyandi:And based on that you have options.
Pay Mayock:Right.
Pay Mayock:And again, in talking to sales teams and they asked the question, great question.
Pay Mayock:Where does RDX fit and where does LTO tape fit?
Pay Mayock:Usually the customer has already made that decision, but, but the real opportunity
Pay Mayock:is when you find somebody, like I mentioned, like a Sheriff's department,
Pay Mayock:that's buying 10 I'll call them raw.
Pay Mayock:USB disc.
Pay Mayock:And somebody is responsible to collect all the data off all that
Pay Mayock:incoming video, track it for legal reasons, deliver it to a courthouse.
Pay Mayock:And there maybe buying, you know, 10 disc drives, hard disc drives at a time.
Pay Mayock:That person I think, would love to have something more secure like this.
Pay Mayock:Okay.
Pay Mayock:Because the the volume of media that they're actually
Pay Mayock:handling, plugging and plugging.
Pay Mayock:This solves that problem.
Pay Mayock:Okay.
Pay Mayock:It's more secure if you drop both of them, this type of cartridge is more secure
Pay Mayock:than your standard, uh, retail USB drive.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:So Pat, would it make sense for a home user to use RDX?
Pay Mayock:I hate to say yes quickly, but the answer is yes, because you're
Pay Mayock:looking at the cost of your system, whatever laptop you have, et cetera.
Pay Mayock:Um, to be able to get a docking station, for under 300 bucks and then
Pay Mayock:put all your, all your events on a cartridge and keep it on the shelf.
Pay Mayock:That makes sense.
Pay Mayock:I, I would find it hard to understand someone buying a, a tape drive.
Pay Mayock:Like an LTO-8 and using that for their content.
Pay Mayock:It's just so much capacity.
Pay Mayock:Now, if you have that much capacity.
Pay Mayock:Great.
Pay Mayock:Okay.
Pay Mayock:But it's overkill.
Pay Mayock:And the investment costs to begin is high.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:Yep.
W. Curtis Preston:Yeah.
W. Curtis Preston:The, The, average, the average home, I would say it would be the, it
W. Curtis Preston:would be a power home user, right?
W. Curtis Preston:Someone who's creating content.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, although in today's day and age, that could be my granddaughter.
W. Curtis Preston:Who's nine.
Pay Mayock:I know.
W. Curtis Preston:right.
W. Curtis Preston:They're all, they're all independent filmmakers at home these days.
W. Curtis Preston:Right.
W. Curtis Preston:Um, So, all right, well, on that note, uh, I think we'll round things out here and
W. Curtis Preston:say, thanks Pat, for coming on the podcast
Pay Mayock:Hey, thanks for having me enjoy talking about it anytime.
W. Curtis Preston:and thanks Prasanna for a, your a great questions as always
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I try.
Prasanna Malaiyandi:I try and I hope you feel better soon, Curtis.
W. Curtis Preston:me too.
W. Curtis Preston:Uh, and thanks to our listeners and be sure to subscribe so
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