ARMONK, N.Y., - 09 May 2011: IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced new tape storage and enhanced archiving, deduplication offerings designed to help clients efficiently store and extract intelligence from massive amounts of data.
The amount of information generated is increasing dramatically each year driven by armies of sensors, mobile devices, social networks, cloud computing and public sources of information like the Web. At the same time, demand for storage capacity worldwide will continue to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 49.8 percent from 2009-2014, according to IDC (1). Clients require new technologies and ways to capitalize on the growing volume, variety and velocity of information known as "Big Data."
IBM continues to invest in the development of tape storage as an inexpensive, efficient way to store massive volumes of data. For example, IBM is today detailing seven significant improvements to its portfolio of tape and other storage archiving products, including the industry's first tape library system to provide over 2.7 exabytes of automated, low cost storage -- enough to store nearly 3 times all the mobile data generated in the U.S. in 2010 (an exabyte is 1 followed by 18 zeroes).
IBM System Storage™ TS3500 Tape Library is enabled by a new, IBM-developed shuttle technology -- a mechanical attachment that connects up to 15 tape libraries to create a single, high capacity library complex at a lower cost. The TS3500 offers 80 percent more capacity than a comparable Oracle tape library and is the highest capacity library in the industry, making it ideal for the world's largest data archives.
For example, the National Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research (NIWA) in New Zealand uses two TS3500 Tape Libraries to support a sophisticated POWER supercomputer used to tackle challenges in such fields as energy, aerospace, weather and climate modeling. The libraries together hold 5 petabytes of data, the equivalent of more than 1,000,000 DVDs. This means that if a DVD were written to the tape libraries at the rate of one every minute, it would take more than 2 years before their capacity was exhausted.