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Why IBM Media

IBM is the Number 1 hardware manufacturer meaning a lot of drives & opportunity

IBM develops its own technology - 3570, 3590, 3592 & LTO (as part of the LTO consortium)

IBM has been dedicated to tape for over 50 years since developing the first ever tape drive and is continuing to develop new tape solutions & innovations backed by hundreds of IBM active patents - even tape technology that is not immediately thought of as IBM probably has IBM patents & innovations making it work.

Because IBM develops its own technology you can be sure the tape is a "perfect match" to the hardware.

Why is this important?

All IBM drives are designed and carefully manufactured to a specific design point within the established, broader specification range of the tape drive. The IBM Media is then 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. This is particularly important with LTO tapes & drives with so many vendors producing drives and tapes with differing design points that all fit within the broad LTO specifications for compatibility.

As well as improved reliability, testing has actually shown that by optimising the drive & tape you even get more capacity and lower error rates. An IBM LTO 4 tape used on an IBM Tape drive has been shown to have a capacity of 839GB opposed 800 GB. Continued read write testing (up to 300 times) allows the low error rates to maintain the capacity of the tape whereas the increasing error rates on unmatched 3rd party tapes can mean capacity is reduced to half the original capacity !

The error rate is the "comfort zone" & is the difference between the backup mere completing or completing with ease.

As the error rate increases, the customer will -

• Need to Clean the drives more often
• Suffer slower data transfer speed as the drive has to repeat writing data that did not write successfully the first time
• Experience reduced capacity, needing to buy more cartridges to complete the backup job

This pattern of poor performance will continue until finally there are too many errors to correct and the backup or worse restore fails.

As drives increase their throughput speed and more & more data is stored on thinner & more densely packed tape, the quality of the media and its match with the drive becomes more & more important.

IBM Media is used as the Master Standard Reference Tape at the Measurement Assurance Corporation, the third party that performs Compliance testing for the LTO consortium. The Master Standard Reference Tape is the tape media that all other vendors are compared against. Being chosen as the MSRT is an indication of predictability and consistency from cartridge to cartridge IBM has been the MSRT supplier for all four LTO generations.

Occasionally, IBM licences another manufacturer to make a tape that, whilst being designed to the media manufacturer's tolerances is compatible with the IBM tape drive - however compatible is not the same as identical.

By using compatible media the end-user is settling for another manufacturer - s compromise on specification, usually designed to "work" on as wide a range of drives as possible which will probably store less data meaning they have to buy more tape negating the potential "saving".

If there is then a problem with the hardware & media combination IBM will then work with the media manufacturer to reach a resolution rather than being able to use its own labs where both the drive & tape will have been developed - these labs were used to recover data after the fatal 1986 NASA Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. Months after the loss of Challenger the tapes containing the only source of data to understand this disaster were recovered from the Atlantic Ocean, damage from the crash not to mention being "stored" in the sea made even unwinding the tapes, yet alone recovery of the data appear to be impossible.

Users of IBM Media can now collect reward points worth up to 2 USD per tape - your customers can register at www.tapemediarewards.com

Anyone using an IBM drive owes it to themselves & their company to use IBM Media on that drive - superior performance & saving money in use shows that "compatible" is certainly not identical !