New IBM tape offering provides hybrid cloud threat protection

IBM has recently unveiled a new tape offering called the Diamondback Tape Library, which the company claims is designed to give hyperscalers a secure method of storing hundreds of petabytes of data, according to eWeek. According to IBM, the product is a high-density archival storage solution that is physically air-gapped to help protect against ransomware and other cyber threats in hybrid cloud environments. Developed while consulting with more than 100 hyperscalers, including the Big Five and several new wave organizations, Diamondback would also provide long-term archival storage while producing a significantly reduced carbon footprint and total cost of ownership compared to disk and flash solutions. Each IBM Diamondback Tape Library covers 8 square feet of space similar to an Open Compute rack, is able to be ordered together with LTO-9 tape cartridges and is compatible with IBM Ultrium 9 tape drives, allowing for an up to 50% increase in capacity compared with IBM Ultrium 8. Each library can store a maximum of 27 PB of raw data or 69.5 PB compressed data and can be modified for greater data security and compliance via the addition of data encryption and write-once-read-many media.