According to IDC, IBM has consistently been the Number 1 tape hardware manufacturer for the past 20 years, developing and outselling all other brands. This makes IBM tape a great opportunity for tape resellers whilst providing your customers with the best possible product for them.
IBM invented magnetic tape storage in 1952, and has not only continued to be at the forefront of the development of Tape Technology for their own Enterprise Class Drives (Jaguar), but also from 2017 became the sole developer & manufacturer of LTO technology at the release of LTO7. It has development facilities around the world dedicated to tape and storage research.
IBM continues to invest and develop new tape solutions and improvements backed by hundreds of IBM active patents – even legacy tape technology that is not immediately thought of as IBM, probably has IBM patents and innovations making it work. The LTO Consortium, consisting of IBM, Quantum & HP, continue to buy & market IBM Tape Drives under their own branding and also OEM Tape Drive Products out into the wider market through other Tape suppliers such as Spectralogic.
IBM understands Tape is a vital part of any storage environment, and despite claims by the (now obsolete) disk manufacturers tape is not dead. They continue to develop new Drives, Tape Media and the Libraries to support the modern storage demands for traditional Back-Up Environments, both Open Systems & Mainframe, for long term Archive Solutions and to support Cloud infrastructures, this includes a new library solution highly suited to the “hyper scalers” cloud requirements. For Systems of Record IBM still provides the option of data storage on tape behind a Virtual Tape Solution or Tape Solution to the Cloud – the vast majority of banks use IBM Mainframe hardware which underpins 87% of all Credit Card Transactions in the World today. IBM’s Linear Tape File System (LTFS) has so revolutionised the workload for the Media and Entertainment Industry it was awarded an EMMY. The latest (IBM Patented) encryption developments far exceed current requirements needed for the Quantum Computing Era – another example of IBM ensuring tape continues to protect customer’s dataneeds far into the future.
IBM’s Enterprise 3592 or Jaguar tape system is consistently the world’s fastest tape drive, as well as having the highest capacity in the industry. IBM continues to work with it’s Tape Media Partners of Fujifilm & Sony to increase not only capacity and performance, but also reliability. This development work is the vehicle that provides new world records for data storage on tape – the current record is with IBM & FujiFilm at 317GB per Square inch on Strontium Ferrite based Media which is the equivalent of 580TB of uncompressed data on a single Enterprise Tape Cartridge. In August 2023, the next Generation Jaguar Drive will push the native tape media capacity considerably forward once more.
The additional benefit of IBM being the sole manufacturer of Tape Technology, is the ability of sharing tape drive development features designed and developed for the Enterprise or Jaguar drives cascading down to LTO. An example of this is the Recommended Access Ordering (hrRAO) capability developed for the 4th Generation Jaguar Drive released in 2011 and subsequently used for the 5th, 6th & shortly to be announced 7th Generation cascading on to the LTO9 Technology as Open Recommended Access Ordering or oRAO. This IBM developed innovation helps to locate where on the tape the data requested has been written and therefore helps improve seek times to the first byte of data. A true compare for LTO9 using oRAO and not using oRAO, yields performance improvements of 55% & 73% for 16 Segments & 128 Segments respectively.
What makes IBM LTO cartridges best for IBM hardware?
Because IBM develops its own technology you can be sure the tape is a “perfect match” to the hardware.
All IBM drives are designed and carefully manufactured to a specific design point within the established, broader specification range of the tape drive. IBM Media is manufactured to this same specific design point. This optimised or “tuned” drive & media combination provide the best possible performance, reliability & compatibility so the user can be sure when they need their tape the most it will work.
Only IBM tape media is specifically tuned to match IBM tape drives, exceeding the minimum standards set by the LTO Consortium – thus ensuring reliability and durability both in use and for subsequent long term storage, protecting your valuable data on IBM Hardware together with IBM Media.
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