The TS1120 is IBM’s flagship tape drive, which was launched in the fourth quarter of 2005. It used mostly by mainframe customers in IBM’s giant TS3500 library, which can house up to 200 drives and 6,000 tapes.
According to IBM, customers have been asking for a mid-range library that can also be fitted with the TS1120, so that they can use the same gear to read and write tapes across both data center and remote offices.
That is the library that IBM has launched today. Called the TS3400, it has two drives, 18 tape slots, and a list price of $34,000 sans tape drives, which IBM says is a competitive price. It only runs the TS1120 drives, which carry list prices of $35,500 each.
The TS1120 provides native encryption, so IBM is arguing that the TS3400 is the market’s first mid-range library to offer native encryption. Customers will of course have to pay more for those high-end TS1120 drives than they would for the LTO or DLT drives fitted to other mid-range tape libraries, including libraries from IBM.
LTO drives featuring native encryption are expected to ship this year. Quantum Corp says its DLT-S4 drives already offer native encryption, but it has decided not to offer them as stand-alone encryption devices. Instead the company says that next quarter it will begin shipping libraries that integrate encryption key management with DLT-S4 drives.
Currently the IBM TS3400 is shipping only as an Open Systems device, but IBM said it plans to add mainframe support.
While IBM said that its primary target is customers who want to standardize on the TS1120 drive, it does not want to rule out the possibility of TS3400 sales to mid-range customers who want to upgrade to library running a high-end drive. Compared to mid-range LTO tape drives, the TS1120 offers greater availability, better performance in terms of both throughput and seek time, and native encryption.
The predecessor to the TS1120 was the IBM 3590 tape drive. The only mid-range vehicle for that drive was an autoloader, partly because the price of the 3590 consumed too much of a remote office budget to justify any other platform. The 3590 cost almost twice as much as the TS1120, IBM said.
