For those believing that tape is old… what about all these IBM tape storage innovations? Tape as Storage-as-a-Service, physical tape providing greater storage density, tape proving LTO generation 9 technology, mainframe storage tape now providing disaster recovery in the cloud, and tape is part of the Quantum safe planned storage technology. Check out in detail on this recap what we’ve been working on the last year.
January 19, 2021 | OVHcloud, IBM and Atempo announced their collaboration to develop a Storage-as-a-Service offering. This solution will be based on IBM Enterprise Tape technology and an Atempo software stack hosted and operated by OVHcloud in new data centers in the French territory.
December 15, 2020 | IBM unveiled a new milestone bringing to light work more than 15 years in the making between IBM researchers and Fujifilm. Together, we have set yet another new world record in tape storage – our sixth since 2006. Pushing the limits, we achieved 317 GB/in2 (gigabits per square inch) in areal density on a prototype strontium ferrite (SrFe) particulate magnetic tape developed by Fujifilm. This is approximately 27 times more than the areal density used in current state-of-the-art commercial tape drives.
October 26, 2020 | IBM announces its intent to offer LTO 9 Ultrium Tape Drive technology and media that complies with the LTO Consortium Generation 9 specifications across the full suite of IBM Tape Automation Solutions in 2021. The new IBM LTO 9 drives and supporting systems will be designed to help increase tape’s ability to provide cost-effective, secured storage solutions to meet the full range of rapidly evolving 21st-century requirements for storage of less active data.
August 4, 2020 | IBM TS7770 Virtual tape library announces disaster recovery in the cloud by its new object store capabilities. Transparent cloud tiering (TCT) seamlessly automates the movement of data to and from the cloud and offloads much of the management workload to the DS8900F and TS7770 storage systems, reducing mainframe CPU utilization by 50 percent for these tasks. And DS8900F compression gets impacted storing three times more data at the TS7770 targeted system, potentially reducing CAPEX by 55 percent and OPEX over 3-year period by 44 percent.
August 23, 2019 | In order to prepare for the impact that quantum computers are expected to have on data security, IBM Research has been developing cryptographic algorithms that are resistant to potential security concerns posed by quantum computers. As part of this research, IBM Tape has been targeted to provide quantum safe storage. The new IBM quantum computing-safe tape drive prototype is based on a state-of-the-art IBM TS1160 tape drive and uses both Kyber and Dilithium in combination with symmetric AES-256 encryption to enable the world’s first quantum computing-safe tape drive. The new algorithms are implemented as part of the tape drive’s firmware and could be provided to customers as a firmware upgrade for existing tape drives and/or included in the firmware of future generations of tape drives.
December 16, 2020 | IBM reminded us about the role tape will play in our hybrid cloud future and in preserving the world’s memories for decades to come. Here are the 5 things you must recall:
- Investing in tape innovation is the answer to surging volumes of data changing the storage landscape
- Hyperscale and hybrid cloud providers are turning to tape as a strategic imperative
- Tape is highly effective against ransomware and cyber threats
- Breaking a world record while collaborating to advance the tape roadmap
- The future relies on a ‘vintage’ technology
I foresee IBM tape will continue innovating, being the optimal cost-effective solution all type of workloads as we are moving on the AI/big data explosion era. Yes, years ago we believe we were already there, we might need to rename it as the big big data explosion era!