IBM Overhauls Tape Offerings

IBM, in the midst of an annual upgrade of storage hardware and software, has expanded its tape drives and data archiving solutions for small, medium and large businesses.

Chief among the new products is the Armonk, N.Y. company’s fastest tape drive to date, the Storage System TS1120. The drive is more than twice as fast and features double the capacity of its predecessor, the 3592 enterprise tape drive.

The TS1120 shuttles data at a native data rate of up to 100 megabytes per second and has a native cartridge capacity of 500 gigabytes. Rather than rip and replace old systems, IT administrators can use their 3592 data cartridges in the TS1120 and can read and write in generation 1 and 2 format.

Moreover, the greater performance in the TS1120 reduces the number of tape drives required, while the larger capacity reduces the number of cartridges and amount of floor space required.

The IBM TS1120 tape drive will be available October 28th.

Big Blue is also promoting the new System Storage TS3310 Tape Library to help businesses that lack a lot of space. The device is built on the third generation of LTO media and features an expansion module that allows space for additional cartridges, tape drives and redundant power.

The IBM TS3310 will be available November 18th.

At the heart of the new products is a need to speed the back-up and retrieval of information to better accommodate corporate compliance guidelines ordered by federal regulators in the wake of data leaks and accounting scandals.

IBM, EMC, HP and several other storage competitors are all expanding their armaments in the hope of being companies’ preferred provider of data retention hardware, software and services.

For customers who want to focus on regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA, IBM is launching System Storage Data Retention 550 V2.5, a pre-configured device fitted with server, storage and software to manage and secure data.

The new product provides native LTO generation 3 WORM tape support and supports up to 90 terabytes of physical disk capacity, as well as petabytes of storage with attached tape. Users can use this box to store and retrieve data directly to and from their file servers.

The IBM System Storage DR550 V2.5 will launch November 11th.

In other solutions, IBM later this month will start selling the IBM Virtualization Engine TS7510, a piece of software that enables tape virtualization on disk for systems configured for tape. Virtualized tape is used in shops that use tape and disk and tape storage.

To serve the little guy, Big Blue is also offering new Express brand storage offerings.

The IBM Express Storage Platform for Medical Imaging will help small hospitals, digital imaging centers and clinics store, retrieve and protect sensitive medical records for patients.

The IBM Express Storage Platform for Digital Media is designed to help SMB customers harness libraries of images, videos and audio. Lastly, the IBM DR550 Express is a smaller version of the aforementioned DR550, providing pre-configured server, storage and software for data retention.

Article courtesy of InternetNews.com