Tandberg Bankruptcy Leaves A Hole In IBM Power Storage

June 2, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

A problem has been brewing for back and archiving needs for entry and some midrange IBM i shops, and we did not know about it until the spit hit the fan last week. Had we known earlier, we could have warned you. And maybe Big Blue could have and should have warned you directly more immediately a few months ago instead of in the announcement that came out last week and that did not actually explain what was going on even a little bit.

In announcement letter AD25-0836, dated May 27, IBM said that effective that day it was withdrawing Removable Disk Exchange (RDX) disk drive cartridges as well as RDX backplanes for rack-mounted servers and external RDX docking stations from marketing.

The RDX form factor, which was invented by ProStor systems way back in 2004, and the idea was to create a shock-proof, ruggedized removable disk drive that works like a tape drive but costs a lot less and runs a lot faster to provide backup and archive capability. Tandberg Data, a German company that made various kinds of storage devices as well as early generation video conferencing systems, acquired the RDX business from ProStor in 2011, and soon thereafter IBM rolled it the Power6 and Power7 lines in the fall of 2012 running either IBM i 6.1 or IBM i 7.1. And for many smaller IBM i shops, RDX has been the backup media of choice for them.

About a year later, in November 2013, Overland Storage acquired Tandberg Data, creating Overland-Tandberg, and in May 2014, Sphere 3D, a cryptocurrency miner these days, bought Overland-Tandberg. A decade later and Overland-Tandberg, which made both Linear Tape Out (LTO) tape drives as well as the RDX hardened disk drives that tools like IBM’s Backup Recovery Media Services (BRMS) software treated equivalently, said it was giving up its LTO tape business to focus on its RDX business, And in November last year, however, the Tandberg Data portion of the combined company based in Dortmund, Germany, filed for bankruptcy. That part of the company was liquidated in January 2025 and word of this was leaking out in February into the partner channel. At the time, partners were still selling RDX drives as well as QlikStor data cartridges that plug into them.

Here is the statement that IBM put out to Power Systems business partners about the death of RDX:

The initial reports coming out of IBM, which we did not see but which were referred to in the documents we have seen, suggested that customers with existing Power9-based systems who were upgrading to Power10 systems could move their RDX units from the old machines to the newer ones. IBM partners and salespeople were told this is not possible and to focus on the Power10 sale, and to say that maybe if RDX units became available in the future, they could be added later.

This seems like dubious advice considering the RDX manufacturer has been liquidated. Even IBM’s Global Asset Recovery Services (GARS) division, which resells iron taken in trade from Power Systems customers, is telling the Power Systems division it does not have RDX drives in stock and IBM does not want to run a trade-in deal to try to build up stock at GARS, either. We also do not understand why an existing RDX unit in a Power9 machine could not be moved over to a Power10 machine, or even a Power11 machine. This seems. . . harsh, and technically unreasonable considering that RDX units work perfectly well on Power10 machines before this withdrawal.

IBM had a few suggestions for customers in lieu of the RDX units:

To be specific, IBM’s advice to customers who want to have local archiving to buy a TS2280 tape drive with LTO8 and IBM TS2290 with LTO9 for tower/deskside models and a rack-mounted 7226 enclosure if you need to install these in a rack. All of these tape drives require a SAS adapter in the Power Systems machine.

As for the cloud-based backup and archiving, IBM warns resellers that prices and capabilities vary by region and country, but that generally speaking in the United States, using BRMS to backup to IBM’s PowerVS cloud is the cheapest way to do backups and archives, and then the next pricier (and presumably sophisticated) option is Cobolt Iron, followed by Falconstor, which presumably has the most function but also the highest prices.

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