IBM announced a 2.7 exabyte tape library with additional archiving and deduplication functions. The upgrade is part of a series of tape storage announcements.

The company said it was targeting the ‘big data’ market. It claims to have some clear advantages over Oracle in tape storage and said that it stood out from companies such as EMC didn’t have a tape offering.

It would continue to develop tape because it was relatively inexpensive and reliable it said citing the amount of digital archives stored to tape is set to experience a six fold increase from 2010 through 2015, according to Enterprise Strategy Group. It added that it is tape storage market share leader with over 40% revenue share – more than twice as much share as the next competitors HP and Oracle, according to IDC. Media, entertainment and healthcare are key markets.

IBM Tape Storage

At the top end the IBM System Storage TS3500 Tape Library uses shuttle technology – a mechanical attachment that connects up to 15 tape libraries to create a single, high capacity library complex at a lower cost. The TS3500 offers ‘80 percent more capacity than a comparable Oracle tape library and is the highest capacity library in the industry,’ it said.

’As compared to the Oracle SL8500 max tape library complex with native T10000c, which offers a max capacity of 500PB. The TS3500 max tape library complex with native TS1140 offers a max capacity of 900PB, when maximizing cartridge capacity. IBM said it sourced figures for the SL8500.

The TS1140 Tape Drive, uses up to 64 per cent less energy and can deliver up to 80 percent more performance than a comparable Oracle drive according to the company. The TS1140 holds 4,000,000MB. The IBM 726 Magnetic Tape Unit held 2MB. The company said that as compared to the Oracle T10k-C. The TS1140 operates at 51W and at 24W standby power. The Oracle T10k-C operates at 67W max power. The TS1140 max throughput is 650MBps. The Oracle T10k-C max throughput is 360MBps. Assumes compressible data.

Tape drives old and new

Today, IBM is announcing file system access to select IBM tape libraries with the IBM Linear Tape File System Library Edition (LTFS LE).

Additional announcements include better performance using its SONAS (Scale-out Network Attached Storage) offering, which scales to over 14 petabytes of clustered storage. SONAS now offers double the throughput.

In addition, SONAS will now support an open standard protocol called NDMP, enabling clients to backup and protect large amounts of data in SONAS using ISV applications that support NDMP.

IBM added to its Information Archive for Email, Files and eDiscovery, a pre-installed, pre-configured archiving solution. With integrated hardware, software and services, the technology can reduce the cost of installing and implementing a storage archive by up to 70% compared to starting with piece parts and can be deployed in a few days, according to IBM’s internal measurements.

Tape virtualization offerings for mainframe or open storage environments include: many-to-many replication feature to IBM System Storage TS7650 ProtecTIER Deduplication Solutions that will allow enterprises with multiple data centers to automatically replicate backup data between locations so multiple copies of critical data can be stored and quickly restored if needed.

Customer Example: The National Institute of Water &Atmospheric Research (NIWA) in New Zealand uses two TS3500 Tape Libraries to support a sophisticated POWER supercomputer used to tackle challenges in such fields as energy, aerospace, weather and climate modeling. The libraries together hold 5 petabytes of data, the equivalent of more than 1,000,000 DVDs. This means that if a DVD were written to the tape libraries at the rate of one every minute, it would take more than 2 years before their capacity was exhausted.