IBM System Storage TS3100 Tape Library Express Model

Highlights

• Designed to support the newest generation of LTO with one IBM Ultrium 5 full-height tape drive or up to two IBM Ultrium 5 half-height tape drives, as well as LTO generations 3 and 4 tape drives using a 2U form factor
• Fibre Channel (FC) attachment support for half height LTO-5 and LTO-4 tape drives
• Designed to offer outstanding capacity, performance and reliability for a cost effective back up, restore and archive for midrange storage environments
• Remote library management through a standard web interface supports flexibility and improved administrative control over storage operations.

Our world has become more instrumented, interconnected and intelligent. In this new environment where storage requirements are doubling every one to two years, smarter mid-size companies strive to store, archive and retrieve more information efficiently, while driving down IT costs. You need to protect and secure your information, meet compliance requirements and make information available when you need it, at the lowest possible cost.

The IBM System Storage TS3100 Tape Library Express Model and its storage management applications are designed to exceed your capacity, performance, data protection, reliability, affordability and application requirements. The TS3100 is designed as a functionally rich, entry-level tape-storage solution incorporating LTO tape technology. The IBM TS3100 Express model is an excellent solution for large-capacity or high-performance tape backup with or without random access. The TS3100 is also an excellent choice for tape automation for IBM Power Systems, IBM System x and other open systems.

The IBM TS3100 Tape Library Express is well-suited for handling the backup, restore and archive data-storage needs for small to medium-size environments. With the use of one LTO full-height tape drive or up to two LTO half-height tape drives and 24 tape cartridge capacity, the IBM TS3100 is designed to take advantage of LTO technology to cost-effectively handle growing storage requirements. The TS3100 Tape Library is configured with two removable cartridge magazines, one on the left side (12 data cartridge slots) and one on the right (12 data cartridge slots). Additionally, the left magazine includes a single mail slot to help support continuous library operation while importing and exporting media. A bar-code reader is standard in the library, supporting the library’s operation in sequential or random access mode. The TS3100 also comes standard with remote management capabilities to allow for remote administration of the tape library through a web interface. Path Failover, a new optional feature for this library, is designed to provide automatic control path failover to a preconfigured redundant control path in the event that a host adapter or control path drive is lost, without aborting the current job in process.

The IBM Ultrium 5 technology is designed to provide greater capacity with continued support for encryption of data. The hardware encryption and decryption core and control core reside in the IBM Ultrium 5 tape drive (available to the TS3100 with the 6 Gigabits per second (Gbps) Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and 8 Gbps FC interface). A larger internal data buffer in the full-height drive helps improve data access rates and reduce cartridge fill and rewind times along with dynamic channel calibration designed to help increase data throughput. In addition to reading and writing to LTO Ultrium 5 tape cartridges, the LTO 5 tape drive can read and write to LTO 4 cartridges and read LTO 3 cartridges with improved data rates. The IBM Ultrium 5 tape drive is designed to support up to 140 MegaBytes per second (MBps) native data-transfer rates and up to 1.5 TeraByte (TB) native physical capacity when using the IBM System Storage Ultrium 1.5 TB Data Cartridge (3.0 TB with 2:1 compression). The TS3100 featuring Ultrium 5 tape drives has a capacity of up to 36 TB native (72 with 2:1 compression).

The IBM LTO 4 tape drives are designed to support up to 120 MBps native data-transfer rates. In addition, the TS3100 featuring Ultrium 4 tape drives has a capacity of up to 19.2 TB (38.4 TB with a 2:1 compression).

The IBM TS3100 Tape Library Express featuring full-height and half-height technology offers an 8 Gbps FC and 6 Gbps SAS interfaces for Ultrium 5, Ultrium 4 and Ultrium 3 (HH SAS only) drives and it can be attached to a wide variety of open-system servers. The sequential or random access library comes in a stand-alone base configuration with the option of an industry-standard 19-inch rack-mount kit. The IBM TS3100 also has an Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) display and indicators for power, drive and activity, error status and message information.