Over the past few years, as we all know, data protection has evolved from a routine and dull backup process into a strategic pillar of resiliency.  As our protection environments grew in size (as well as older), dealing with multi-petabyte backup volumes and an increasing need for immutable retention, we began looking for ways to renew and expand our protection capacity while lowering cost and energy consumption.  This led us in part, to IBM’s newest generation of tape technology, known as “The Diamondback”. 

@IBM Love that name by the way. 😉

Why the Diamondback?

Already a long time customer of IBM's tape family, as we’ve been using IBM’s solutions for a few years now, we knew that our old TS4500, though still capable, needed to be eventually replaced and upgraded into a newer, more robust LTO solution.  While at TechXchange 2024, we came across the Diamondback on display in the Sandbox and literally fell in love.  We were immediately drawn to Diamondback’s combination of density, simplicity, and added security.

In a simple 19 inch rack, we can hold all our tiered data needs, in native capacity (not counting compression!) while consuming near-zero power when idle, which is an ideal complement to our existing disk-based systems and the fact that we moved part of our backup infrastructure into a colocation environment.  Beyond scale and efficiency, the Diamondback also supports (if the option is purchased of course) a direct S3 compatible object communication layer if needed, allowing it to integrate directly with IBM Spectrum Protect or other backup tools that can write to object storage.  This opens new options for hybrid architectures that blend tape reliability with object-based accessibility.

Integration with our Spectrum Protect and Defender

In our environment, we introduced our new Diamondback as a new tier in our Spectrum Protect (SP) infrastructure.  Keeping our TS4500 for the time being while we transition fully into the Diamondback.  Our current backend setup uses IBM FlashSystem arrays for primary storage and a mix of disk-based and tape-based pools for our legacy backups.  The Diamondback now serves as our long-term retention and air-gap layer while being offsite from our primary datacenter.

We defined it within SP as a new storage target capable of handling both traditional tape copy pools and S3 object based data streams.  This flexibility allows backups to flow through SP using either native tape operations or S3 protocol, depending on policy and data type.  The result: a unified platform that bridges our legacy infrastructure and also brings us a modern backup option for other requirements such as our Defender Data Protect installation, requiring long term retention that are offloaded to the Diamondback.

Results and Early Impressions

Installation was straightforward, thanks to the simple one rack setup, its modular design and remote management features.  We did though, experienced a “dead on arrival” ET2 (electronic tray)…which had us scratching our heads for a little while.  It was resolved easily with the reception of a new ET2 unit which proved to be quite easy to swap. 

From day one, we noticed lower power draw compared to our TS4500, simplified media handling, fast operations and a more streamlined data flow for our long-term retention policies.  The integration with SP via S3 also makes it possible to protect and retrieve data seamlessly, even when combining disk, cloud, and tape layers.

Our Diamondback implementation strengthens our resiliency posture, offering an immutable, offline tier that can’t be encrypted or corrupted by ransomware.

Looking Ahead

We’re continuing to expand our solutions while simplifying our configurations, as well as looking to explore S3 based tiering for additional workloads and planning future expansion and connectivity toward our new LTO-9 media.  With Diamondback, we feel we’ve modernized our tape strategy while preserving what made it reliable in the first place, durability, isolation, and scalability.

In short, we feel this is a modern take on a tape solution, for an era that demands both efficiency and resiliency.

#IBMDiamondback #SpectrumProtect #DataResilience #Storage #CyberRecovery #ModernTape #IBMChampion