IBM Readies LTO-10 Tape Drives And Libraries
June 9, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan
As the capacities on flash and disk arrays continue to embiggen and the desire to keep data around is at a fever pitch as everyone is trying to figure out how to train generative AI models using all of their data, the need for tape backup for transactional and operational data has never been higher.
Which is why it is good timing for IBM to be rolling out its tape drives based on LTO-10 cartridges.
The IBM 3589 Ultrium LTO-10 cartridges, which are known as Models 554 and 654, have a native capacity of 30 TB, and with 2.5X data compression can yield as much as 75 TB per cartridge. The is a 66.7 percent increase in capacity compared to the LTO-9 tape cartridges that first shipped in September 2021, with 18 TB native and 45 TB compressed capacity. The Ultrium 10 cartridges were revealed in announcement letter AD25-0155 on May 27. The LTO-10 cartridges will be available on June 27, and they come in packs of five or packs of twenty.
IBM is rolling out its Ultrium 10 tape drives, which were developed in conjunction with Quantum for the past four years, can drive data at 400 MB/sec natively, which works out to 1 GB/sec with the 2.5X data compression. That is the same data rate as the LTO-9 tape drives. The LTO-10 tape drives can attach to systems over 12 Gb/sec SAS interfaces and 32 Gb/sec Fibre Channel interfaces. That is four times the Fibre Channel bandwidth of the LTO-9 and LTO-8 drives, the latter of which had a native data rate of 360 MB/sec and had 12 Gb/sec SAS interfaces and 8 Gb/sec Fibre Channel interfaces like the LTO-9 drives. The LTO-10 drives developed by IBM and Quantum have encryption support using quantum safe AES/GCM256 symmetric keys.
The Ultrium LTO-10 drives are available in two of IBM’s tape libraries. In announcement letter AD25-0164, you can find out about the Diamondback Tape Library, which has 800 cartridges at half capacity and up to 1,584 cartridges at full capacity. That is a maximum of 46.4 PB of capacity in native format and 116.1 PB with 2.5X data compression squeezing it all down. The TS4500 tape library takes capacity up another notch, as you see in announcement letter AD25-0153, with 695 PB of capacity native and 1.73 EB compressed when fully loaded with 23,160 cartridges and heaven only knows how many tape robots to balance it out with performance to that capacity.
The Diamondback and TS4500 libraries will be available on June 13.
Pricing information was not made public, but it sure would be interesting to see what these things cost. We doubt very much that most IBM i shops will need a full library with exabytes of compressed capacity, but petabytes is not outside the realm of possibility for all kinds of structured and unstructured data.
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