IBM introduces enterprise magnetic tape drive that holds 50TB per cartridge
Again within the day: Shoppers stopped utilizing magnetic tape storage so way back that many studying this are doubtless too younger to know what it’s. Nonetheless, its means to retailer huge quantities of information on comparatively small media makes it helpful for a lot of organizations as a long-term backup answer. So, corporations like IBM by no means stopped creating this mature expertise.
IBM lately introduced its newest magnetic tape drive and cartridge kind, with greater than double the storage capability of earlier fashions. It ought to assist cloud storage suppliers and different enterprise prospects retailer excessive quantities of information extra effectively.
Magnetic tape drives have lengthy occupied the position that arduous drives have shifted towards for the reason that emergence of SSDs – cost-effective chilly storage. Though they’re too gradual for many customers, latest developments permit magnetic drives to hold tons of of gigabytes per sq. inch of tape. This week, IBM’s choices within the area took one other step ahead.
The corporate’s new TS1170 drive can retailer 50TB of uncompressed knowledge per tape cartridge utilizing the brand new JF media kind. Using 3:1 compression expands the capability to 150TB. The expertise represents a 250 % improve over the TS1160 drive and JE media, which reached 20TB uncompressed and 60TB compressed. Moreover, the TS1170 manages a local knowledge fee of 400 MB/s, growing to 900 MB/s when dealing with compressed knowledge.
IBM’s new drive is available in two varieties: the Mannequin 70F with a dual-port 16 Gb Fibre Channel interface and the 70S with a 12 Gb SAS dual-port interface. The 70F additionally helps standalone installations via conventional Fibre Channel host attachment interfaces for cloud-based and open-compute setups.
Moreover, a 3U kind issue rack mount equipment makes the 70F appropriate with most 19-inch racks, enabling set up from the entrance or again with out tooling. The tools helps IBM’s TS4500 tape library and is RoHS-3-compliant.
Different TS1170 options embrace velocity matching, high-resolution tape listing, Channel calibration, dynamic adaptive equalization, capability scaling, WORM storage (write-once-read-many), knowledge compression, and extra. Encryption works via IBM Safety Key Lifecycle Supervisor and could be both library or application-managed.
Sadly, switching to a brand new cartridge kind issue means the TS1170 lacks compatibility with the cartridges utilized by prior drive fashions like varieties E or D. Furthermore, the drive at present would not assist connections to an IBM TS7700, and just one system can use the TS1170 at a time.