{"id":127457,"date":"2021-09-09T14:24:18","date_gmt":"2021-09-09T21:24:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/09\/big-blue-shines-a-light-on-the-future-of-tape-storage"},"modified":"2021-09-09T14:24:18","modified_gmt":"2021-09-09T21:24:18","slug":"big-blue-shines-a-light-on-the-future-of-tape-storage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/09\/big-blue-shines-a-light-on-the-future-of-tape-storage","title":{"rendered":"Big Blue Shines A Light On The Future Of Tape Storage"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

Circa 2020<\/p>\n

\n

IBM knows how to adapt to an ever-changing enterprise tech landscape. The venerable company more almost 20 years ago shed its PC business \u2013 selling it to Lenovo \u2013 understanding that that systems were quickly becoming commodity devices and the market was going to stumble. A decade later IBM sold its X86-based server business to Lenovo for $2.3 billion and in the intervening years has put a keen focus on hybrid clouds and artificial intelligence<\/a>, buying Red Hat for $34 billion<\/a> and continuing to invest its Watson portfolio.<\/p>\n

However, that hasn\u2019t meant throwing out product lines simply because they\u2019ve been around for a while. IBM has continued to upgrade its mainframe systems to keep up with modern workloads and the bet has paid off. In the last quarter 2,019 the company saw mainframe revenue \u2013 driven by its System z15 mainframe in September 2019 \u2013 jump 63 percent, a number followed the next quarter by a 59 percent increase.<\/p>\n

Tape storage is a similar story. The company rolled out its first tape storage device in 1,952 the 726 Tape Unit, which had a capacity of 2MB. Five decades later, the company is still innovating its tape storage technology and this week said that, as part of a 15-year partnership with Fujifilm, has set a record with a prototype system of 317 gigabits-per-square-inch (GB\/in2) in areal density, 27 times more than the areal density of current top-performance tape drives. The record, reached with the help of a new tape material called Strontium Ferrite (SrFe), is an indication that magnetic tape fits nicely in a data storage world of flash, SSDs and NVMe and a rising demand for cloud-based storage.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Circa 2020 IBM knows how to adapt to an ever-changing enterprise tech landscape. The venerable company more almost 20 years ago shed its PC business \u2013 selling it to Lenovo \u2013 understanding that that systems were quickly becoming commodity devices and the market was going to stumble. A decade later IBM sold its X86-based server [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":513,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-127457","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127457","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/513"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=127457"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127457\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=127457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=127457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=127457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}