IBM System Storage TS3200 Tape Library Express Model

Highlights

• Designed to support the newest generation of LTO® with up to two IBM Ultrium® 5 full-height tape drives or up to four IBM Ultrium 5 half-height tape drives, as well as LTO generations 3 and 4 tape drives using a 4U form factor
• Designed to offer outstanding capacity, performance and reliability for a cost-effective backup, restore and archive for midrange storage environments
• Remote library management through a standard web interface supports flexibility and greater administrative control of storage operations

The IBM TS3200 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 up to two LTO full-height tape drives or up to four LTO half-height tape drives and 48 tape cartridge capacity, the IBM TS3200 model is designed to use LTO technology to cost-effectively handle growing storage requirements. The TS3200 Tape Library is configured with four removable cartridge magazines, two on the left side (24 data cartridge slots) and two on the right (24 data cartridge slots). Additionally, the lower left magazine includes a three-slot I/O station 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 TS3200 also comes standard with remote management capabilities to allow for remote administration of the tape library through a Web interface. Path Failover, an optional feature, 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 resides in the IBM Ultrium 5 tape drive (available to the TS3200 with the 6 Gbps 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 to help increase data throughput. In addition to reading and writing to LTO 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 MBps native data-transfer rates and up to 1.5 TB native physical capacity when using the IBM System Storage Ultrium 1.5 TB Data Cartridge (3.0 TB with 2:1 compression). The TS3200, featuring Ultrium 5 tape drives, has a capacity of up to 72 TB native (144 TB with 2:1 compression).