Sundry IBM Tape Subsystem Announcements

March 18, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

IBM has been shipping tape drives and tape libraries based on LTO-9 tape cartridge technology for nearly three years, which is why we think it is odd that last week we saw that the TS2290 machine now has a feature code to attach to IBM i or OS/400 systems.

In announcement letter AD24-0463, which is pretty terse as these things go, we see that there is a new feature code 9400 for the TS2290 tape drive, also known as the 3580 Model H9S. This appears to be just a feature code to allow for direct attachment of the TS2290 to a Power Systems server, possibly meaning it doesn’t need to go through the Virtual I/O Server, a kind of stripped down AIX that can be used as a storage driver sitting between IBM i and devices such that Big Blue does not have to create native drivers for IBM i. Big Blue does not make the same effort in explaining things as it used to.

As far as we know, when the TS2290s were announced in September 2021 and then the product line was extended in November 2021, there was support for these tape drives for AIX, Linux, and IBM i. These systems which shipped on December 3, and provide an 18 TB native format per cartridge with up to 45 TB per cartridge with data compression on the LTO-9 tapes. These TS2290 drives can be used standalone mode, as is often the case with IBM i shops, or can be plugged into TS4300 tape libraries, which we discussed here.

In announcement letter AD24-0495, the enhanced power distribution units used in conjunction with the TS4500 tape libraries, also known as the 3584 Models D5, D55, L25, L55, S25, S55, TR1, and TR2, that were expected to be withdrawn from marketing on May 10 this year, are being kept in the IBM catalog until further notice. These PDUs are installed in pairs and hook into 200 volt or 240 volt lines on a 30 amp circuit breaker and can supply juice to multiple frames of TS4500 (3584) tape libraries.

And finally, in announcement AD24-0427, IBM says that effective September 30 of this year, it will stop selling 3592 Gen 3 Type C tape cartridges, which plug into the TS1140 tape drives (which are also known as the 3592). This includes the 500 GB and 4 TB versions of the cartridges. So if you have a TS1140/3592 Gen 3 tape drive and you don’t want to move to a new technology, you had better buy some media before it is all gone. Last September IBM and Fujifilm unveiled the TS1170 tape drive, also known as the 3592 JF, which can put up to 150 TB on a single Fujifilm cartridge.

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