IBM and Sun both announce 1TB tape drives

It has been an interesting week, but certainly the most significant storage news is that IBM and Sun both introduced One-terabyte Tape Drives.

IBM and Sun Microsystems have once again brought enterprise tape storage drives into the spotlight: Sun's announcement was made on Monday July 14 and IBM announced its new product just a day later. Now, whichever vendor you embrace, you have new options for enterprise tape storage at a lower TCO (total cost of ownership) and increased storage capacity.

On Monday, with an exclamation of “Bigger is Better, Biggest is Best,” Sun announced that it had succeeded in developing the very first one-terabyte tape drive, the Sun StorageTek T10000B. This new drive provides a maximum of 1TB of storage capacity on a single cartridge for open or mainframe system environments. Unfortunately for Sun, the bragging rights over “biggest” was short-lived as the very next day IBM announced a new tape drive that offers the same capacity as the Sun drive, but is also faster. Named the TS1130, IBM's new device will store up to one TB of data per cartridge and offers a native data rate of 160 MB/s – compared to 120 MB/s for the T10000B.

Both drives re-use existing media, thus providing backward read/write compatibility and asset protection for the current customers, and claim to support up to 1 TB of native capacity (uncompressed) per tape cartridge.

The T10000B (like previous drives) has the ‘control unit’ function built into the drive and supports FICON and Fibre Channel.

The TS1130 has dual FC ports and can connect directly open systems servers, or FICON and ESCON support is available utilizing the TS1120 or 3592 Tape Controllers.

Here is a side by side comparison of some of the “speeds and feeds”:

Description	Sun T10000B	IBM TS1130
Performance
Data transfer rate (uncompressed)	120 MB/sec	160 MB/sec
Max Data transfer rate	360 MB/sec (4 Gb Interface), (compressed, maximum)	400MB/Sec
Capacity
Capacity, native (uncompressed)	1 TB (240 GB for Sport Cartridge)	1TB (using JB/JX media), 640GB (using JA/JW media) or 128GB (using JJ/JR media)
Data Connectivity
Interface	4 Gb Fibre Channel, FICON	Dual-ported 4-Gbps native switched fabric Fibre Channel. The drives can be directly attached to open systems servers with Fibre Channel, or to ESCON or FICON servers with the TS1120 Tape Controller Model C06 or the IBM Enterprise Tape Controller 3592 Model J70.
Mechanical
Height	3.5 in. (8.89 cm)	3.8 in. (95 mm)
Depth	16.75 in. (42.55 cm)	18.4 in. (467 mm)
Width	5.75 in. (14.61 cm)	5.9 in. (150 mm)
Environmental
Operating Temperature	+50° F to +104° F (+10° C to +40° C)	16°to 32°C (60°to 90°F)
Operating Relative humidity	20% to 80%	20% to 80% non-condensing (limited by media)
Tape format
Format	Linear serpentine	Linear serpentine
Power
Consumption/dissipation (operating maximum continuous - not peak)	63 W (drive only) and 90 W (including power supply)	46 Watts (drive and integrated blower)
Cooling
Consumption/dissipation (operating maximum continuous - not peak)	420 BTU/hr	307 BTU/hr
Encryption
Encryption	The crypto-ready StorageTek T10000B tape drive works in conjunction with the Sun Crypto Key Management Channel rate, uncompressed sustained (Fibre Channel) 120 MB/sec System (KMS). The KMS delivers a simple, secure, centralized solution for managing the keys used to Interface specifications (Fibre Channel) N and NL port, FC-AL-2, FCP-2, FC-tape, 4 Gb FC encrypt and decrypt data written by the T10000B tape drive. Developed on open security standards, the Read/write compatibility interface T10000 format KMS consists of the Key Management Appliance, a security-hardened Sun Fire x2100 M2 rack mounted server and the KMS Manager graphical user interface (GUI) that is executed on a workstation. The KMS runs without regard to application, operating platform, or primary storage device. It complies with Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2 certification. Requirements and specifications may change, so check with your Sun representative.	Built-in encryption of a tape's contents for z/OS, z/VM, IBM i, AIX, HP, Sun, Linux and Windows

Tape is not dead!

For several years I have been chagrined by the various proclamations from industry experts that “Tape is dead”. These reports (many of which are published by vendors that do not offer a tape product) extol the virtues of using disk as a replacement for tape, but ignore the operational benefits and cost savings that tape provides in the enterprise IT environment.

These benefits become more apparent as the quantity of data and the size of the enterprise grows. At some point, it becomes evident that keeping all copies of all data on spinning disk storage is simply unsupportable – both operationally and financially.

Even so, the many myths regarding the demise of tape have been perpetuated over the years. Therefore I was very pleased to see an article debunking some of these myths appear in the June/July 2008 issue of Z/Journal.

This article, “Mainframe Tape Technology: Myths and Realities”
(By Stephen Kochishan and John Hill) discuss several of these popular myths and then describe both the reality and best practice that aptly describe the issue. This article should be an interesting read for the enterprise storage professional.