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Here's the latest on new formats
In June of last year, veteran tape analyst Fara Yale at Dataquest called the tape market a surreal saga. You can believe it. In just the last six weeks before press time, announcements of both new and upgraded tape formats and performance statistics have hit the mid-range market. In looking at all these unveilings, the reader should bear firmly in mind that these are technology announcements only. Changes often come to a format in the space between technology announcement and finished product. So right now, the formats are surreal, that is, beyond reality. What is also surreal is the explosion in mid-range tape competition.
Why The Explosive Growth?
As most readers of Computer Technology Review are aware, the tape-based digital storage market continues to grow for two principal reasons. The first is the explosion in digital content. The second is that tape-based digital storage continues to be the most cost-effective way to both store and retrieve large amounts of digital content. More recently, the very rapid growth in server-based network computing, which itself has created the need for archive, backup, and disaster recovery solutions, are scaled to the specific requirements of server-based computing.
The Half-Inch Space
Never being one to fall behind in aggressive research and development, IBM announced enhancements to its family of Magstar MP tape drives and libraries that will provide fast, reliable access to data for unattended backup and restore operations in mid-range environments. Magstar MP's improved data rate gives customers a new performance spec supporting business-critical applications such as network storage management, data warehousing and digital libraries.
The Magstar MP 3570 is designed to deliver 7MB/sec native sustained data rates (up to 15MB/sec compressed), outrunning their Model B drives threefold and better. IBM claims that the Magstar MP 3570 Model C offers a faster combination of data rate and access time than comparable mid-range and network tape storage solutions.
"Magstar MP's high transfer rates and fast access to data make it a complete solution that offers unmatched flexibility to support virtually any standard backup environment as well as near-online applications," said Kevin Reardon at IBM Storage Systems Division.
In addition to the drive performance upgrade, the Magstar MP 3575 Tape Library Dataservers have added...