Fifty years of storage innovation

Innovations in tape storage begun mid-20th century, particularly those related to density and performance, were being achieved at an accelerating rate. The IT world made it beyond the widely publicized Y2K "disaster" without incident, confident that if things had gone awry, data recovery would have succeeded largely because of tape storage. The unfolding of a brand new century found 100GB of native capacity already available on a single LTO cartridge. Magstar 3590 had just doubled the capacity of its full-function, enterprise-level tape solution by introducing extended-length media. And, the performance and reliability of both the initial 10GB media and the new extended-length media were attained through an intensive co-development with leaders in the magnetic media industry.

Many breakthroughs in IBM disk storage in the early 2000s made their way into tape and tape controllers, including the ability to partition physical libraries into a number of logical libraries, fibre channel support, peer-to-peer duplication of data, support of Linux and other open systems, and new connectivity options across a growing number of storage platforms. At the same time, the reliability, serviceability and overall cost of IBM tape subsystems improved while tape technology in general was called upon to hold increasingly greater amounts of the world's data.

On December 1, 2000, IBM was awarded the 2000 National Medal of Technology for its contributions to hard disk drives and storage technology. The successes of disk and tape storage were becoming increasingly interwoven as comprehensive storage solutions.

Even though technological advances in storage were coming quickly, they often resulted in incompatibility with existing infrastructure and architecture. A more unified view of information storage needed to be developed. IBM, no stranger to challenges or creativity, realized the time had come for a new paradigm for data storage.

IBM TotalStorage

Introduced in 2001, the IBM TotalStorage concept was to convey the notion of a robust portfolio of storage products, including tape, disk, network attached storage (NAS) and software as well as service and financing. Linda Sanford, senior vice president and group executive of Storage Systems Group commented. "Rather than having teams of very talented, creative and specialized people spread across geographically separated divisions and locations, all fighting for dominance in their area of information processing and storage, it seemed much better to pull these teams together and focus on integrating the strengths of each. Better leveraging of the strengths of servers, disks, controllers and tape storage offered customizable, cost-effective and scalable solutions. What IBM Storage has achieved in the past has provided a truly impressive arsenal of technology and experience that should give us a significant advantage if integrated properly to address the needs of our customers. The theme of IBM TotalStorage was meant to capture that new thinking about storage."

Within the context of this integrated vision for storage, a new family of heads for tape devices was developed, which leverages the advances and proven technologies from disk storage. The IBM LTO Model 3580 head was the first IBM tape drive recording head to break away from the older, modular, closed and contoured head design that carried the burden of linear tape drive recording for so long. Armed with the proven capabilities of these disk head technologies. significant increases in tape track density were possible.

This improved head process allowed the mass of the head to be reduced while achieving synergy with disk head technology and process advances. A timing-based servo, invented by IBM, provides very precise position information to the drive so that interleaved bands of data can be written in a serpentine manner -- eight tracks at a time -- to construct 384 tracks capable of storing 100GB of uncompressed data in the first-generation LTO cartridge. Coupled with improved media, actuator and format innovations. significant increases in the reliable placement of very narrow tracks on a thin tape were demonstrated with the first LTO tape product.

The IBM LTO family of tape drives is expected to deliver increased storage capacity and performance for several generations. Consistent with the LTO roadmap, a 200GB capacity cartridge will be produced with a significant improvement in data rate from 15MB/second to 30MB/second. LTO storage currently provides more than several hundred terabytes (TB) of uncompressed capacity in a fully automated IBM tape library, in the space equivalent to eight, five-drawer file cabinets. These automated tape solutions are able to support multiple tape formats in the same physical library separated from the host by distances of 100+ kilometers.

IBM continues to push the boundaries of tape storage technology. In 2002, the 50th anniversary of IBM's introduction of tape storage, one terabyte of uncompressed information was successfully written and, more importantly, read back successfully in a single half-inch tape cartridge equivalent in size to the current LTO tape cartridge.

According to Giga Information Group, data storage doubles every three years. As enterprise customers move to consolidate their storage environments, the ability to store large volumes of data in a small footprint will grow in importance. The compression of one terabyte of data into a four-inch wide by five-inch long by one-inch thick cartridge exceeds a density of one gigabit per square inch on the recorded media.

"We believe this achievement reinforces IBM's leadership in this key storage industry," said John Teale, IBM distinguished engineer at IBM Tucson. This advantage was achieved using advanced particulate tape technology coupled with improved high-density track placement made possible by utilizing novel track following, timing-based servo invented by IBM and the most advanced recording head technology used in linear tape drives. With proven hard-disk technologies and inventions by IBM tape development, one terabyte is only a milestone, not a barrier. The future looks good for improved capacity and substantial increases in data rate, reliability and management of tape storage for the next 50 years.

Storage Tank and Autonomic Computing

The future of storage may well become autonomic in nature -- self-healing and self-managed. Autonomic storage is an outcropping of the larger IT push into grid computing, which will make many future computing functions available like a utility to the network. Autonomic storage would eliminate many complex storage management tasks for administrators. IBM's autonomic server project, eLiza, and other grid computing projects are underway already, although true autonomic storage architectures are still years away from reality. Enroute to achieving that vision, a short-term solution is the next generation of storage model, which must be open and support open standards, must include virtualization, should have a single file system to share data residing on storage devices and should provide much more comprehensive policy-based management features. Tape promises to continue its legacy as cost-effective, reliable, high-capacity storage, serving as an integral part of the future of IBM TotalStorage solutions.