IBM and Sun Introduce New One-terabyte Storage Tape Drives

It looks like the latest news from the storage market finally bring something else than just details on Solid State Drives. These days, the entire media has been ablaze with talks about the most recent announcements made by IBM and Sun Microsystems, which have once again brought tape storage drives into the spotlight. While Sun's announcement was made on Monday, IBM came through with its new product just yesterday.

At the onset of this week, Sun announced that it had succeeded in developing the very first one-terabyte tape storage drive. Dubbed as the Sun StorageTek T10000B, the new product has been designed to provide its users with a maximum of 1TB of storage capacity on a single cartridge for open or mainframe system environments. According to Jason Schaffer, senior director of storage marketing at Sun, customers deploying the device could "cut data centre space requirements in half." Sun's device is said to offer the second generation of media reuse and backward read/write compatibility. With a starting price set at $37,000, the Sun StorageTek T10000B Fiber Channel Tape Drive will become available this month.

Following Sun's announcement, IBM too came out with a new tape drive device that the company claims to be the fastest one-terabyte storage tape drive, which offers data protection and comes with energy efficiency features. Dubbed TS1130, IBM's new device will be capable of storing up to one TB of uncompressed data per tape cartridge, offering a native data rate of 160 MB/s. This will enable the completion of storage backups at a speed up to 54 percent faster than the previous generation drive.

"IBM is committed to tape storage as part of a tiered information infrastructure and today we offer the fastest, highest capacity drive in the market," said Cindy Grossman, Vice President of Tape and Archive, IBM System Storage. "Tape storage is the most green and cost-effective form of data storage available, and the IBM TS1130 Tape Drive will enable clients to address their growing needs for affordable and robust data solutions by storing more data on fewer cartridges, which will save clients valuable time, space, energy and money."