An IBM Diamondback tape library has been installed at CERN’s data center in Geneva, Switzerland.

In a post on LinkedIn, Vladimír Bahyl said the deployment marks a “real shift in how [CERN] thinks about large-scale data archiving,” allowing the research institute to explore using a scale-out model as opposed to a scale-up one.

Bahyl is a senior IT service delivery manager at CERN, responsible for its data archive and IBM Storage Protect backup service, which totals 1.3 exabytes and 15 petabytes of data, respectively.

In a previous LinkedIn post, Bahyl said that in August 2025, CERN archived about 50PB of new data in a single month, roughly 1.7PB or around 9 LTO-9 tape cartridges per day.

“Time has come to consider moving from caring for a few pets… to managing a whole herd of cattle,“ Bahyl said of the deployment.

Launched in 2022, IBM’s Diamondback tape library can hold up to 46PB of data in a single rack (using LTO Ultrium 10 cartridges), storing up to 116 PB per library with 2.5:1 compression.

The physically air-gapped solution can store up to 1,548 usable LTO data cartridges in an eight square foot (0.7 sqm) floor space – the same as a standard OCP rack.