History 2003: IBM and StorageTek Boost Mainframe Tape Drives

In the span of a few days, within the high-end enterprise tape drive market, mainly for mainframes, we’ve seen the arrival of devices with record-breaking capacity and speed.

IBM has evolved the 3590H into a new generation, the 3592, with native capacity from 60 to 300GB, and transfer times from 14 to 40MB/s. A new data compression method, called “byte level compression theme swapping” permits the tripling of these figures to 900/120.

Unfortunately this time, there is no compatibility between the 2 generations. It’s impossible to read and write 3590H cartridges on the 3592 drive, and conversely, which means the users will be obliged to migrate the data from one media to the other.

2Gb FC, Ficon and Escon interfaces are supported.

As a result, sole and major competitor StorageTek has been relegated to second place with its 9940B (200/30).

For the cartridge, IBM turned to Fujifilm and its Nanocubic media technology, rather than to Imation. It contains a memory on a contactless silicon storage device to hold information about the specific cartrige, a similar technology already seen on AIT, DLT and LTO.

The average access time on the 600m tape has been enhanced to 38s, based on a search speed of 8m/s. The average cartridge load time is 21s. WORM media is planned for a forthcoming launch, similar to what StorageTek already offers on the 9940.

The latter has parried in a segment in which Big Blue is not present, that of fast rather than fat drives. Its new T9840C (40/30), which succeeds the T9840B (20/19), boasts access time of 12s, exceptional for a tape drive. The device uses Overland’s VR2 technology for higher capacity and has a native 2Gb FC interface. The drive can read, and only read, the 98404/B media. VolSafe WORM technology is still supported.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 188 on Septmber 2003 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.