Sun, IBM Clash in New Tape Storage, Encryption War

Chris Preimesberger Avatar

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Suddenly, tape in old-fashioned cassettes—technology that is, um, 55 years old—has become the new turf in the latest war between two very progressive IT giants.

Santa Clara, Calif.-based Sun Microsystems made a special trip to New York Sept. 13 to introduce a spate of new products, including new device-level tape encryption with key management for its Sun StorageTek T10000 tape drive. It also unveiled the first virtual tape library to run on the Solaris 10 operating system.

The rollout came one day after IBM introduced what it called the data security market’s “first comprehensive tape encryption solution” with its new Encryption Key Manager, which stores and encrypts data—and the keys that open the data—on high-density tape cassettes.

Both companies clearly understand the fast-growing nature of the data storage market in all its forms: disk drives, storage software, storage services, flash memory and especially tape storage, which is perceived by many data storage customers to be the most cost-effective hardware of them all.

Read the full story on eWEEK.com: Sun, IBM Clash in New Tape Storage, Encryption War