Today IBM launched its Diamondback automated tape system. It joins the TS4500 as a resource for backing up, archiving and protecting massive amounts of data. The advantages of these systems include:
- Cyber Resilience – by creating an air gap between the backed-up and active data – un-mounted tapes can’t be accessed directly by hackers. Write Once Read Many (WORM) technology used in tape drives prevents the overwriting or erasure of data.
- Environmental Sustainability – un-mounted tapes use zero electricity. Although they use motors for selecting and mounting tapes to retrieve their data, there are major savings to be made against storage systems in which all disk and solid state drives draw electricity all the time,
- Reduced Costs – tape capacity is significantly cheaper per terabyte than either disk and solid state storage.
- These are both tape-based systems, unlike IBM’s TS7700 virtual tape library, which uses a combination of disk and tape.
Compared to the TS4500, Diamondback:
- Supports just LTO-9 drives, as opposed to the multiple drives the TS4500 has to ensure backwards compatibility with large enterprise data libraries,
- Is expandable through clustering, rather than through adding expansion frames,
- Has higher data density of up to 27PB in an Open Compute Project (OCP) sized rack,
- Gives customers the ability to do all of its maintenance themselves rather than having to use IBM Service Support; this includes the option to install drives, referred to as self-service Customer Replaceable Units (CRUs), themselves and
- Supports Ceph – the Open Source distributed data storage platform, allowing users to adopt alternatives to IBM’s Spectrum Archive; this underlines one of the reasons IBM transitioning Red Hat’s Ceph and OpenShift Data Foundation teams into its Storage division earlier this month.
The new machine’s introduction will help IBM to grow its tape business by appealing to new customers outside the large enterprises (especially Financial Services companies) who use them for long-term data retention. I believe it will be attractive to the hundreds of Cloud and SaaS providers who want to use this technology without being tied too strongly to full IBM solutions.
The tape market is relatively small part of the $35 billion overall storage systems market. It has high barriers to entry for new suppliers, making IBM’s position secure along with its competitors, which include HPE, Quantum, Spectra Logic and Oracle. It will be interesting to see how the introduction of Diamondback enhances the performance of IBM Storage division’s success over time.