The new drive, originally developed by StorageTek and called the Titanium 10000, only matches the capacity of IBM’s biggest capacity drive. But elsewhere it outguns IBM’s hardware, with faster throughput, and with a promise from Sun that it will include an encryption facility next year – around six months ahead of IBM, which is currently only offering mainframe-based encryption of z/OS back up data.
Via its acquisition of StorageTek, Sun claims to own around two-thirds of the mainframe tape drive and library market, and it said yesterday that it is as much committed to the mainframe market as StorageTek ever was.
The Titanium 100000 packs 500GB of uncompressed data onto a single tape cartridge, at rate of 120MB per second. It carries a list price of $37,000 when fitted with dual Fibre Channel ports, and $44,000 when fitted with dual FICON ports.
StorageTek’s only major competitor in the mainframe tape drive market is IBM, and IBM’s fastest high-end drive is its TS1120, for which Big Blue also quotes an uncompressed cartridge capacity of 500GB. But the throughput of the TS1120 is only 100 MB per second, making it a little slower than the new StorageTek drive in terms of maximum throughput.
The Titanium 10000 will eventually replace Sun’s current 9940B drives. Although these were previously Sun’s highest capacity mainframe drives, they can only load 200GB of uncompressed data onto each cartridge. Sun stressed that the 9940B is not yet ending production. The company’s other high-end tape drive, the 9840C, does not overlap with the Titanium 10000 because its low capacity cartridges are designed to give rapid file access times.
If StorageTek could have matched IBM’s capacity without requiring its customers to adopt a new cartridge format, it would have. One consolation for customers is that Sun is promising that the next generation of the Titanium 10000 will pack 1TB of uncompressed data onto each cartridge.
The encryption facility will comprise a firmware update to the Titanium drive, and a server-hosted key management system, and according to Sun will ship in the first half of next year, as will a WORM facility. The promise of encryption next year prompted IBM to send journalists a reminder that it recently launched software that allows backup tapes to be encrypted on the mainframe.
But John Oltsik, analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group, said: IBM would love to have the encryption running on the drive right now. Encryption is going to be done in lots of places, but having it there is good it localizes the encryption. Oltsik described Sun’s estimate that IBM’s mainframe tape drives will sport encryption around six months after those from Sun as probably a fair guess.
Oltsik pointed out that IBM’s drive-based encryption will use the same key management system as its current z9-based encryption, easing a future migration to drive-based encryption.
