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Published: 26 April, 2022
IBM have announced the End of Support for their TS3100 and TS3200 Tape Libraries from 31st December 2022. So, Chilli have taken the time to asses a couple of replacement options that would be available moving forward.
The TS2900 is an entry level unit with a single drive and 9 cartridges. It’s a good option for any organisation with a single system and one partition to store a week’s worth of backups. As long as backups don’t take more than one tape, 9 backups can be performed without having to change media. We’ve checked costs and this solution would be around £9,000.
The TS4300 will hold 3 drives and 40 cartridges. There is also the option of adding expansion units which will allow 3 extra drives and 40 more cartridges each time. For organisations with multiple systems and multiple partitions environments, then this is a far more robust option. An entry level configuration, consisting of 2 LTO drives and 40 cartridges would cost in the region of £16,000.
If you are concerned about your technical debt and don’t want to replace hardware with more hardware, and migrate archived data on to new LTO technology, IBM Cloud Storage for i (ICC) might be the answer. ICC is a Licensed Program Product that enables IBM i clients to store data to a public or private cloud for purposes such as archiving, backup recovery, and file sharing. It allows BRMS to write backups to virtual tape cartridges, which are then sent to Cloud Storage.
Support for the target storage is currently limited to Amazon AWS S3 and IBM Cloud Object Storage but we fully expect this to be expanded upon in the near future which should then match your Cloud Storage of choice. To get this solution up and running would cost approximately £8,000 for the software and implementation plus any storage costs in the Cloud.
You could also give consideration to Virtual Tape Libraries, but that would take a whole different level of consideration and is something Chilli would suggest that you come and talk to us about in more detail.
