World’s First 1TB Tape Drive, by Sun StorageTek
Bet that Big Blue will react rapidly.
This is a Press Release edited by StorageNewsletter.com on July 15, 2008 at 3:47 pmSun Microsystems, Inc. raised the bar on the storage industry with the release of the industry’s first one terabyte tape storage drives. The new eco-efficient Sun StorageTek T10000B tape drive offers customers one terabyte of native storage capacity on a single cartridge for open or mainframe systems environments. The leader in tape storage automation, Sun has delivered on its commitment to the best-in-breed archive innovation and continues to trump the industry with high-performance, high capacity solutions that offer significantly greater return on investment versus the competition.
Today’s data centers are experiencing exponentially growing data rates with flat to declining budgets. CIOs and data center managers need highly available access to data and the assurance that the media upon which they are storing data is both reliable and secure. In addition, they need to consolidate floor space and lower power requirements. Sun’s new highly innovative tape solutions help customers to minimize costs through better performance and capacity.
"Sun has again delivered on its promise to help customers achieve greater datacenter efficiency and raised the bar on the industry by bringing the world’s first one terabyte tape storage drive to market," said Jason Schaffer, senior director, storage marketing, Sun Microsystems. "The high capacity Sun StorageTek T10000B tape drive works with the fast access Sun StorageTek T9840D tape drive to optimize customers’ multi-tiered storage architecture and cut datacenter space requirements in half."
The T10000B protects customers’ investments and maximizes IT return on investment by providing the second generation of media re-use and backward read/write compatibility; therefore, allowing customers who have standardized on Sun StorageTek T10000 media family to gain double capacity on existing cartridges. With the enterprise-class T10000 platform’s proven reliability and availability in high duty cycle environments, customer data centers will be equipped for 24×7 operations.
Pricing and Availability
The Sun StorageTek T10000B Fibre Channel Tape Drive starts at $37,000 and will be available this month.
Comments
The former native record capacity in a tape cartridge was 800GB on LTO-4 (for open systems only but with the same 120MB/s transfer rate), and 700GB for the IBM TS1120 for mainframes with Ficon attachment. Big Blue, supposed to announce its terabyte drive last June, will probably launch it very soon to react to its only competitor in this field.
Historically, the capacity of the tapes follows the hard disk drive. But Seagate has just announced a 1.5TB HDD. The next tape record will be probably for LTO-5 (1.6TB and between 180 MB/s and 360MB/s).
The price of one LTO-4 tape drive is about one tenth of what you have to pay for this new T10000B but, if can get SCSI, SAS or FC interfaces with LTO, there is no Ficon for it. Why? We suspect the LTO consortium, founded by IBM and others, obliged its members not to offer this mainframe connection.
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