IBM Adds VXA 320 Tape Drive to p5 Line

Published: February 16, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

As part of the System p5 announcements this week, IBM rolled out a new low-end tape drive for the p5 Unix server line and its companion OpenPower and i5 brethren. The tape drive is a 160 GB VXA-320 unit, and it costs $1,500. The VXA-320 drive, at a 12 MB/sec data transfer rate, has twice the speed of its predecessor, the VXA-2 drive that IBM launched in the first p5 systems in 2004. Obviously, the VXA-320 supports compression, which gives it a 24 MB/sec transfer rate and a 320 GB capacity per VXA tape.

The VXA-320 drive requires IBM's AIX 5L V5.2 or higher and also supports Red Hat and Novell Linuxes as well as IBM's own i5/OS V5R3 or V5R4 from the i5 line. This means if you use AIX on your primary logical partitions and Linux or i5/OS on your secondary partitions, you can share the VXA-320 drive across all those partitions.