Wednesday, August 27, 2008

New frames for the TS3500

Yesterday IBM made an announcement of two new, driveless frames for the TS3500 or 3584 Tape Library : 'New IBM System Storage TS3500 Tape Library Models S24 and S54 support higher density' (ZG08-0632). These driveless frames offer a higher density and therefore a higher capacity per frame. For the LTO frames there's the S54 frame with up to 1.320 slots offering a 3:1 increase in capacity. Replacing a model D23 by a S24 gives you a 2,5:1 increase with up to a thousand slots instead of 400. 600 slots are ready for use and you need an additional HD (High Density) CoD (Capacity on Demand) feature in order to use the next 400 slots.

Now don't think you can have up to 15.000 slots with all S24 frames. Apparantly it's limited to six frames and the maximum slots is 6.887 slots. I'm not exactly sure how this number is reached and I can't find much additional information for the moment.

The structure seems to be a tiered architecture. Up to now a cartridge cell only contained one cartridge. These cells are 'tiered' and can contain more than one cartridge. How this is actually operated in the TS3500, I'm not sure for the moment, but I guess pretty soon, more information will be coming our way about this.

Planned availability : November 7, 2008 (some additional features will be later).

No comments: