Sun Touts Tbyte Tape Drive

Sun ramped up its tape strategy today with what it describes as the worlds first Tbyte tape drive.

The T10000B is the successor to Sun’s T10000 tape drive, which was launched in March 2006, and it offers double the capacity of its predecessor.

”It’s the world’s first native 1-Tbyte capacity tape drive,” says Alex North, Sun’s group manager for tape and archive solutions, adding that users can reuse the cartridge media from the T10000 for the T10000B. “They are able to double the amount of information that they can store without making any additional cartridge media investments.”

Sun’s T10000B gives the vendor a capacity hike over its tape rival, IBM, whose TS1120 offers a maximum capacity of 700 Gbytes, although IBM has hinted that enhancements could be imminent.

”Watch this space for news shortly,” said an IBM spokeswoman today. “IBM is the hands-down industry recognized leader in tape storage solutions, and it's safe to say that we will continue to do so with our future announcements around speed and innovation.”Like the T10000, the T10000B offers a data transfer rate of 120 Mbytes/s, compared to IBM’s 104 Mbytes/s TS1120.

The T10000B will be available this month, priced from $37,000, the same list price as the T10000. North told Byte and Switch that a Ficon version of the drive will be launched later this quarter.

The exec added that Sun has around 1,000 customers for its T10000, although he was unable to publicly reference any of its “several” T10000B early adopters.

Although still a viable low-cost alternative to traditional disk, tape has not had the best publicity over recent years, as evidenced by recent examples of lost and stolen tapes.

Other emerging backup technologies such as RDX are also being pushed as an alternative to tape, not to mention the emergence of solid state disk, which is quickly changing the dynamics of the disk market.”It’s an interesting story, but it’s one that tape has responded to,” says North, adding that tape can still offer compelling benefits over disk. “It can easily be seven to ten times less cost per stored Gigabyte, compared to Tier 2 disk.”

The exec adds that tape can also be up to several hundred times more energy efficient than disk because data at rest on tape consumes little or no power.

”Tape is most definitely not dead,” he adds. “If you look at what is driving most of the data growth that data centers have to deal with, it’s long-term data archives.”

Sun also unveiled a number of T10000B media options today, including the VolSafe WORM, which is aimed at highly regulated industries where firms must ensure that data cannot be over-written.

A fast-access, low-capacity media option, the T10000B Sport, was also launched today. Unlike the 1-Tbyte drive, the Sport offering can hold just 240 Gbytes of data, although it takes just 28 seconds to access the first byte of data, compared to 62 seconds on the T10000B.Pricing for the VolSafe WORM starts at $212.75, compared to $131.50 for the Sport version. Standard T10000B media pricing starts at $178.75.

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