Saturday, June 25, 2011

Tape As The Ultimate Backstop: IBM's TS3500 Gets Even Better

By Molly Webster


In the datacenter, the tape library is the ultimate lifeline to combat data loss and data corruption. Tape's reliability with today's LTO5 media and off-line status is essential, given that tape isn't as vulnerable to lightning-fast overwrites and corruption.

IBM's recently announced expansion of the TS3500 Tape Library improves the capability of the IBM Total Storage Tape Library, permitting companies to increase their EMC, IBM, and NetApp environment's backups and reliability.

In May, IBM unveiled enhanced archiving, as well as new tape storage offerings designed to help customers store enormous amounts of data and extract it intelligently. A few of the improvements announced might be game changers for "Big Data" consumers who need to deal with massive amounts of high-volume, low-tier data, as well as most enterprise storage consumers.

Enhancements to the IBM System Storage TS3500 Tape Library System can store over 2.7 exabytes of low-tier, automated storage (enough capacity to store 3 times the quantity of data generated by US mobile phones last year) The IBM TS3500 IBM Tape Library can be upgraded with a new shuttle technology that can connect 15 tape libraries 64% much less energy consumption and 80% more efficiency than comparable Oracle drive IBM tape libraries using the IBM Linear Tape File System Library Edition (LTFS LE) can now with much more efficiently index, search, retrieve and share data stored on Generation 5 LTO tape, an open tape storage format Why is this important-isn't tape dead?

Absolutely not. Tape is an additional tier that could be your datacenter's last hope if serious outages and data corruption happen. Also, tape's reliability and cost/GB blows disk away, so for really huge, low-tier information volumes, tape makes sense where disk does not (and can't).

Tape is safe and reliable in a way that doesn't (yet) have a substitute. Without having tape, even the almighty Google would have been sunk when Gmail suffered from data loss in 2010. IBM leveraged IBM LTO drives along with their tape program to restore data and maintain their customers' crucial information safe.




About the Author:



No comments: