IBM resuscitates tape
IBM resuscitates tape
Oct 17, 2005: Disk backup may be seen as the holy grail of storage, but apparently not everyone thinks so. IBM have this week launched three new tape drives and brought back an optical disk library due to popular demand.
Along with the drives, IBM have also launched a new tape virtualisation engine, the TS7510. Aimed at midrange UNIX and Intel servers, the TS7510 can push data into fewer tape drives with higher capacities, whilst virtualisation is used to split data between tape and disk.
IBM claims that the drive it has launched this week, the TS1120, is also the fastest on the market today with a data rate of 100Mbps and 500Gb capacity. With specs like this tape may indeed still have a future.
"Tape is still the cheapest method of storing digital data and will be for some time" said Peter McNamara, IBM's system storage tape manager. "Other suppliers say that tape is dead, but that is not what our customers say"
IBM have also brought back and updated version of their optical drive as well. The 3996 optical library for iSeries customers is back this week too, with 30Gb capacity and scalability up to 5 terabytes.
"We phased that product out because we thought there was no demand for that type of optical library anymore" said McNamara. "So many of our customers asked about it we brought it back as a new version."
So whilst disc based backup is being touted as the uber way to go, it appears that in times of trouble many still prefer to go with what they know.
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