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General Information
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July 16, 2010
• Vol.32 Issue 15
Page(s) 32 in print issue
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Helping SMEs Go Tapeless
Bus-Tech Is Blazing A Trail In The Storage Market With Its Tapeless Approach
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| BUS-TECH
(800) 284-3172
www.bustech.com
• Bus-Tech specializes in tapeless storage systems for mainframe libraries in enterprises of all sizes.
• The company’s Mainframe Data Libraries work with mainframes from several big-name manufacturers, and its Virtuent application writes data to a variety of storage arrays, including NAS and SAN.
• “We’re going to look for new markets to leverage our presence into, and our controller can handle all types of media, whether it’s SATA, SAN, WORM—you name it,” says Jim O’Connor, Bus-Tech’s director of product marketing.
 | It can be lonely in a market you’ve helped create. Companies that introduce products that don’t fit within the current paradigm can spend a long time out in the cold, trying to convince potential buyers that what they have is what the buyers need—and that the fact that it’s not like other products is a good thing.
Bus-Tech, a maker of tapeless storage products for mainframe libraries (www.bustech.com), has emerged whole from that kind of situation and has done so with a product that its competitors are now emulating. That tells Jim O’Connor, Bus-Tech’s director of product marketing, that his company has changed the market, and for the better. “The reaction in 2001 was that you had to have tape, and we were mocked by [our competitors],” O’Connor says. “Those [companies] now have tapeless options.”
 A Range Of Options
Bus-Tech has been around since 1987, and its first product was a single-board computer that could connect Ethernet networks to mainframe channels. Today, Bus-Tech’s main claims to fame are its MDLs (Mainframe Data Libraries), a set of virtual tape library controllers. Bus-Tech’s MDLs work with IBM-compatible and Unisys 2200 mainframes, and they vary by data transfer speed and by the number of channels and tape devices they can support.
For example, the MDL-6000 can handle 1.5GB of data per second. It can support between six and 12 FICON channels and between 768 and 1,536 tape devices. The MDL-1000, on the other hand, has one FICON channel and can deliver 100MB of data per second to up to 256 tape devices.
Bus-Tech’s Virtuent application runs on the MDL, and it handles the protocols and writes data sets to whatever storage arrays the customer has, including network-attached storage, storage-attached networks, WORM (write once, read many) media, and many other options.
Changing The Market
Bus-Tech came up with its technology because of what was happening in storage: expanded capacity. “At first, the capacity of tapes was 50 megabytes, but soon that was a terabyte, and so relatively small data sets wasted tape,” O’Connor explains. “Other companies were coming up with virtual storage managers to collect data sets for better tape utilization, and we decided to come up with a library that didn’t need tape.”
With big competitors whose main interest was in a market that wanted tape, Bus-Tech needed muscle to help it break into markets that wouldn’t necessarily be receptive to a lack of tape. There was plenty of resistance in those early days, which isn’t entirely gone today, O’Connor says. So the company partners with disk vendors and uses their networks of resellers instead of doing direct sales. That means that Bus-Tech’s partners are sometimes storage vendors and sometimes resellers that are also storage vendors. The company has about 25 resellers, and one of Bus-Tech’s priorities is to reshape that network. “Most storage companies are either open systems or mainframe, and very few bridge that gap,” O’Connor says. “The ideal company understands both, but the primary skill set is mainframe, because you’ve got to be able to talk mainframe to these guys.”
Selling Well
Although Bus-Tech is a U.S.-based company, a fair chunk of its business is overseas, about 40%. That international footprint is concentrated in Europe, but the company sees sales in Japan, Korea, South America, and Australia, as well.
Bus-Tech does well in the financial and healthcare verticals, particularly banks, insurance companies, and stock traders. O’Connor notes that tapeless libraries have a particular appeal for financial companies, especially for purposes of compliance with e-discovery and requirements to maintain data for seven years in its original form without alterations.
Most of its customers are larger companies, and for some time, the company’s products focused on that end of the market. But Bus-Tech saw a need and interest in smaller companies, as well, prompting the creation of MDLs that would appeal to small to medium-sized enterprises. Its larger MDLs came up with options that included both the controller and the storage. For example, the MDL-100S is intended for companies with storage needs that aren’t as extensive as larger companies; unlike Bus-Tech’s larger MDLs, the MDL-100S has storage contained in the controller. The MDL-100V, available in FICON or ESCON configurations, also appeals to SMEs; it processes tape data to a VTL (virtual tape library) system.
Ever-Changing Needs
Storage disks get smaller, cheaper, and faster all the time, which is good for the storage market but means Bus-Tech has to stay on its toes, making sure that its products are configured to work with those changes. The company also has to keep up on storage technologies that aren’t related to the actual storing, but with the handling of data as it’s stored—encryption, deduplication, and so on. “We just added RSA key management to [Virtuent],” O’Connor says. “There are always new functionalities, and we have to determine which technologies that apply to the market should be added.”
Even if virtual tape has been accepted in the mainframe market to some extent, Bus-Tech still encounters resistance to the idea, and the company continues to educate customers about the advantages of going tapeless. O’Connor says the two primary arguments are control and space reduction. “We talk to potential customers with 120-square-foot tape silos, and when you’re talking about 17 of them, that’s 2,000 square feet,” he explains. “When you can talk about reducing that to one rack of 19 inches, taking up two tiles in the data center, that’s a compelling argument.”
The control argument is more complicated but just as compelling, and Bus-Tech sales engineers are able to talk about being able to encrypt data as it’s transmitted securely and using snapshots of data instead of the actual data to do testing.
Bus-Tech’s big goal is to expand its footprint in data centers. “We’ve got about 1,000 controllers in data centers now, and we’re hoping to expand that,” O’Connor says. He notes that the storage market is constantly changing, and there’s no way to know whether disks or solid-state media will be the medium of choice or whether it will be a totally new technology that wins out. Regardless, O’Connor thinks Bus-Tech will be there whatever happens. “We’re going to look for new markets to leverage our presence into, and our controller can handle all types of media, whether it’s SATA, SAN, WORM—you name it,” he says. 
by Holly Dolezalek
A Look At Bus-Tech Products
| Product | Description | | MDL-100S | Virtual tape library with FICON or ESCON channels; provides up to 4.5TB of RAID-protected storage | | MDL-2000 | Virtual tape library with two FICON or two to three ESCON channels; delivers 300MB of data per second and emulates up to 256 tape devices. | | MDL-4000 | Virtual tape library with between four and eight FICON channels or six and 12 ESCON channels. Can support between 512 and 1,024 tape devices. Includes up to four redundant independently operating emulation nodes, two redundant Access Control Points, and the ability to attach large-scale storage arrays. | | MDL-6000 | Virtual tape library with between six and 12 FICON channels and can emulate 768 to 1,536 tape devices. Includes up to six redundant, independently operating emulation nodes, two redundant Access Control Points, and the ability to attach large-scale storage arrays. | |
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