Scalable, Cost-Effective Long-Term Storage with Built-In Air-Gap Protection
IBM's tape portfolio spans drives, libraries and media built for compliance, long-term retention and cyber-resilient archive. Tape remains one of the most cost-effective and secure storage tiers available — offline by design, immune to ransomware, and capable of shelf lives of 30+ years under proper conditions.
IBM's tape range covers everything from individual drives through to mainframe-scale virtual tape libraries, alongside the LTO and 3592 media that runs in them. All of it shares the same core advantage — a genuine offline air gap that disk and cloud tiers can't fully replicate — while offering some of the lowest cost-per-TB storage available for long-term retention and compliance archives.
Modular, scalable tape automation supporting thousands of cartridges and multiple LTO Ultrium and IBM Enterprise tape drive generations.
Virtual tape library purpose-built for IBM Z mainframe environments. Up to 1.5PB disk cache and 100PB total storage with tape and cloud attachment.
Ultra-dense LTO-10 tape library offering up to 61.9PB native (317PB expanded) capacity for cost-efficient, air-gapped long-term archives.
Enterprise workhorse drive for 3592 JE cartridges. 20TB native / 60TB compressed per cartridge, integrates with TS4500 and TS7700.
Next-generation enterprise tape drive for 3592 JF cartridges. 50TB native / 150TB compressed with up to 400 MB/s native throughput.
Latest LTO Ultrium generation. 30TB native / 75TB compressed per cartridge with transfer speeds up to 1,100 MB/s.
Enterprise-ready, widely adopted media. 18TB native / 45TB compressed per cartridge, backward-compatible with LTO-8.
Legacy enterprise tape media line, native capacities from 300GB up to 50TB across generations for TS1160 and TS1170 drives.
Write-once media for compliance and audit, compatible across IBM's LTO and 3592 tape systems for immutable long-term retention.
Despite the rise of flash and cloud storage, tape remains one of the most cost-effective and secure mediums for long-term retention. It consumes zero power when idle, has no recurring egress or subscription costs, and — critically — offers a genuine physical air gap that connected disk or cloud storage cannot fully replicate. That combination makes it a core part of any serious cyber-resilience and compliance strategy, working alongside flash and disk tiers rather than replacing them.
If you're planning a backup or archive refresh, or building out a cyber-vault strategy, talk to Fortuna Data. As an IBM Silver Partner we can help you scope the right combination of drives, libraries and media for your retention requirements and budget.