History 2002: 50% More Capacity for IBM 3590H

IBM continues, slowly but surely, to evolve its high end half-inch 3590 cartridge drives, which have sold WW to the tune of 87,000 units (with an installed base of 16 million cartridges) in 7 years.

This extremely high ratio of 184 cartridges per drive, is explained mainly by the fact that the devices, mostly attached to mainframes, are primarily integrated in huge automatic libraries from IBM, as well as from StorageTek, of course.

The company has launched its 3590H drive, a follow-up to the 3590E, which dates from 1999, and was itself a successor to the 3590B announced in 1995. Four years to double the cartridge capacity, then another 3 years to increase it by 50% – none of this is exceptional, when you compare it to the growth of open tape drives (DLT, LTO) or even HDDs.

The new TotalStorage Enterprise Tape Drive 3590 model H thus jumps to native capacities of 30GB and 60GB (with extended length roll), with a transfer rate that remains the same at 14MB/s. These numbers triple with data compression.

The 50% increase in capacity compared to the previous model E was obtained through an increase in the number of longitudinal recording tracks, from 256 to 384, thanks to the enhanced MR head. The new H drives use the exact same cartridges, either extended or not, supplied primarily by Imation, as the E units. Furthermore, H models can read (but not write) cartridges written with B and E models still sold by IBM. The old devices can be field upgraded with the new H units.

The interfaces offered are still the same: FC, Ultra SCSI, Escon and Ficon, in the latter 2 cases via an IBM 3590 A60 controller.

The base price is $46,500 for a rack-mountable tape unit (H11) and $43,500 for a library mountable device (H1A). The monthly maintenance contract is respectively $260 and $230.

Recall that Big Blue launched the 3590B in 1995 and the 3590E in 1999 at exactly the same list price. On June 28, the company withdraws its 3490E. While these high-end units are certainly much more expensive than DLT and LTO open tape units, and they also have lower capacity, they feature better transfer rates and most importantly, increased reliability due to the use of an air bearing system that keeps the magnetic head from touching the magnetic roll.

Since IBM mainframe tape-compatible manufacturers have disappeared, only StorageTek, with its T9940 cartridge drive (60/11 native), is still around to compete in this market segment. Big Blue recently demo’d (SN 05/02) a 1TB 3590-type cartridge drive, although, given the speed with which this technology advances, that is to say, only a tripling of capacity in 7 years, this product will not be on the market any time soon.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 174 on January 2002 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.