IBM announced Monday new tape storage and enhanced archiving, duplication technology designed to help clients efficiently store and extract intelligence from massive amounts of data. The amount of information generated is increasing dramatically each year driven by armies of sensors, mobile devices, social networks, cloud computing and public sources of information like the web. At the same time, demand for storage capacity worldwide will continue to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 49.8 percent from 2009-2014, according to IDC. Clients require new technologies and ways to capitalize on the growing volume, variety and velocity of information known as “Big Data.” IBM has invested in the development of tape storage as an inexpensive, efficient way to store massive volumes of data. It has recently detailed seven significant improvements to its portfolio of tape and other storage archiving products, including the industry's first tape library system to provide over 2.7 exabytes of automated, low cost – enough to store nearly three times all the mobile data generated in the US in 2010. IBM System Storage™ TS3500 Tape Library is enabled by a new, IBM-developed shuttle technology – a mechanical attachment that connects up to 15 tape libraries to create a single, high capacity library complex at a lower cost. The TS3500 offers 80 percent more capacity than a comparable Oracle tape library and is the highest capacity library in the industry, making it ideal for the world's largest data archives. IBM in 1952 pioneered the use of magnetic tape for data storage. Today, IBM is announcing the IBM System Storage TS1140 Tape Drive, which holds two million times more data than IBM's first tape drive. The TS1140 employs fewer and more efficient components developed with IBM Research, enabling it to use up to 64 percent less energy and can deliver up to 80 percent more performance than a comparable Oracle drive, so clients can improve productivity at a lower cost. Tape storage is gaining new opportunities as a low cost, energy efficient way for companies in industries like media and entertainment and healthcare to create huge archives of digital assets and information being driven by Big Data. In fact, the amount of digital archives stored to tape is set to experience a six fold increase from 2010 through 2015, according to Enterprise Strategy Group. IBM has a clear edge over storage vendors that don't support or develop tape. Tape and disk can be used together to deliver clients tiered storage that enables them to store data within the different tiers based on their data priorities. For example, IBM's Scale-out Network Attached Storage (SONAS) system and Information Archive both use policies to automatically migrate data to the tape storage tier. This can reduce total cost of ownership for clients by up to 40 percent in the long-term, according to an internal IBM study. IBM is also improving the IBM Information Archive for Email, Files and eDiscovery, a pre-installed, pre-configured archiving solution. With integrated hardware, software and services, the technology can reduce the cost of installing and implementing a storage archive by up to 70 percent compared to starting with piece parts and can be deployed in a few days, according to IBM's internal measurements. Finally, IBM is announcing new or enhanced tape virtualization offerings for mainframe or open storage environments to provide clients improved access to and protection for their data in the virtualized datacenter. “As part of its $6 billion annual investment in R&D, IBM continues to develop innovative storage technologies for smarter computing,” said Brian Truskowski, General Manager, IBM System Storage and Networking. “The data protection and retention solutions IBM is announcing today provide clients with a comprehensive approach to protecting and accessing their most valuable asset – their data.”
