IBM Tape Storage

With the demand for storage increasing and the storage density of traditional hard disk drives nearing its physical limit, along with the increasing threat of cyber-attacks making the need for air-gapped storage evermore crucial, the demand for tape is dramatically increasing. With the opinion of tape as being long dead in favour of hard disk drives IBM has been developing its tape technology in the background, the current LTO9 generation offering up to 45 TB of data storage per cartridge (18 TB native).

Three key benefits of tape storage include high capacity, air-gapped security, and low cost. This makes it ideal for archival and backup needs. Tape has been a backup medium for IBM i for decades and is integrated into many popular backup solutions like Veeam, making it easy to add to your existing backup system.

Integrating tape into your backup solution for X86-based systems ensures a fully air-gapped and cost-effective backup repository. This allows for longer-term storage as the local backup repository is overwritten according to your retention policy. Periodically copying full copies of the repository to tape, air-gapped and stored in a different location, adds protection against data loss due to corruption, cyber-attacks, or physical disasters.

IBM LTO tape technology features impressive compression processed on the drive itself, without additional processing overhead on your system. LTO9 offers a native capacity of 18 TB and up to 45 TB compressed, with each generation increasing significantly. This ongoing capacity improvement in tape technology ensures its relevance and effectiveness for data storage needs.