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New Tape Systems for SMB clients

By Tony Pearson posted Fri February 15, 2008 12:41 AM

  

Originally posted by: TonyPearson


Wrapping up my week on the Feb 12 announcements, I will finish off talking about thenew Half-High (HH) LTO4 drives available for our TS3100 and TS3200 tape libraries.

Small and medium sized business (SMB) clients are looking for small, affordable tapesystems. Tape is inherently green, using orders of magnitude less energy than disk,and is very scalable by simply purchasing more tape cartridges.

TS3200When IBM first announced them, the TS3100 supported one drive with 24 cartridges,and the TS3200 (see picture at left) supported two drives and 48 cartridges. Unlike disk, that mentions RAWcapacity and then lowers it to indicate usable capacity in RAID configurations, tapeis just the opposite. LTO4 cartridges have 800 GB raw capacity, but with an average of 2:1compression, can hold a usable 1.6 TB of data. LTO4 also supports WORM cartridges fornon-erasable, non-rewriteable (NENR) types of data, and encryption capability.

As a follow-on to our HH LTO3 drives, IBM is the first major storage vendor to offerthe new HH LTO4 drives in entry-level automation, which directly attach via 3Gbps SAS connections to your host servers. The HH models allows you to have two drives in the TS3100, and four drives in the TS3200.

You can mix and match, LTO3 and LTO4. Why would anyone do that? Well, the Linear Tape Open [LTO]consortium --made up of technology provider companies IBM, HP and Quantum--decided to support N-2 generation read, and N-1 generation read/write. So, anLTO3 can read LTO1 cartridges, and read/write LTO2 and LTO3 cartridges. TheLTO4 can read LTO2 cartridges, and read/write LTO3 and LTO4 cartridges. For SMBcustomers that still have some LTO1 cartridges they might want to read some day,mixing LTO3 and LTO4 is a viable combination.

Of course, IBM still offers full-high (FH) versions of LTO3 and LTO4, which offer a bit faster acceleration, back-hitch and rewind times than their HH counterparts, and also offer additional attachment choices of LVD Ultra160 SCSIand 4 Gbps Fibre Channel as well.

So, for SMB customers that are simply using their tape for backup and archive,and probably not driving maximum rated speeds, having twice as many slowerdrives might be just the right fit.

For more information on IBM's Feb. 12 announcement, see the[IBM Press Release].

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Comments

Archive User
Tue February 19, 2008 05:30 PM

Josh,My apologies. Good catch!
IBM is the first to deliver LTO4 HH drives in "entry level automation", these small TS3100 and TS3200 libraries. I have edited above post to make this more clear.
From the press release: "IBM is the first company in the storage industry to offer Ultrium 4 Half-High SAS half-high tape drives in entry automation, enhancing tape performance over the previous generation."
And yes, Quantum is a major tape vendor, and valuable partner in the LTO consortium.

Archive User
Mon February 18, 2008 08:59 PM

Looks like the spam filter may not be working as well as one might like. I guess Quantum isn't considered a major storage vendor but they've had LTO-4HH 3GB/s SAS and deduplication as well.