In a bid to gain a larger slice of the burgeoning tape storage market, IBM Corp this week announced an OEM partnership with Digital Information Corp (IDIC) under which the two will combine their technologies to offer customers what the two claim is the fastest tape storage available on the market.
Under the deal, IBM will resell IDIC’s automated tape library – its Scalar 100 and FastStore products – alongside its upcoming tape storage device, StorageSmart Ultrium- the first product to be announced under Big Blue’s new Linear Tape-Open initiative. The initiative was set up about two years ago by IBM, Seagate and Hewlett-Packard as a way of ensuring interchangeability between different vendors’ tape drives. In the same way that you can play any cassette tape in any stereo device, the aim of the initiative is to enable any vendors’ tape drives to work in any storage library unit and vice versa, said Steve Berens, marketing director of OEM tape products for IBM.
Berens says its StorageSmart Ultrium adheres to the new linear open tape standard in that it can store up to 200Gb of compressed data but it says the new drive copies data 2.5 times faster than anything else currently available, at 15Mb per second or 108Gb per hour.
IDIC’s library products work by automating the storage process. A robotic device facilitates the changing of tape drives when each one has reached its maximum storage potential.
Automated tape storage is the next big thing in the storage market, said Steve Whitner, marketing director for ADIC. The combined IBM and ADIC solution will be aimed at enterprise environments and midrange network server boxes where the need for storage is exploding because of the growth of data.
