IBM TS4500 R7 Tape Library Guide

The IBM® TS4500 (TS4500) tape library is a next-generation tape solution that offers higher storage density and better integrated management than previous solutions.

This IBM Redbooks® publication gives you a close-up view of the new IBM TS4500 tape library. In the TS4500, IBM delivers the density that today's and tomorrow's data growth requires. It has the cost-effectiveness and the manageability to grow with business data needs, while you preserve investments in IBM tape library products.

Now, you can achieve a low cost per terabyte (TB) and a high TB density per square foot because the TS4500 can store up to 11 petabytes (PB) of uncompressed data in a single frame library or scale up to 2 PB per square foot to over 350 PB. The TS4500 offers the following benefits:

• High availability: Dual active accessors with integrated service bays reduce inactive service space by 40%. The Elastic Capacity option can be used to eliminate inactive service space.
  
• Flexibility to grow: The TS4500 library can grow from the right side and the left side of the first L frame because models can be placed in any active position.
  
• Increased capacity: The TS4500 can grow from a single L frame up to another 17 expansion frames with a capacity of over 23,000 cartridges.
  
• High-density (HD) generation 1 frames from the TS3500 library can be redeployed in a TS4500.
  
• Capacity on demand (CoD): CoD is supported through entry-level, intermediate, and base-capacity configurations.
  
• Advanced Library Management System (ALMS): ALMS supports dynamic storage management, which enables users to create and change logical libraries and configure any drive for any logical library.
  
• Support for IBM TS1160 while also supporting TS1155, TS1150, and TS1140 tape drive: The TS1160 gives organizations an easy way to deliver fast access to data, improve security, and provide long-term retention, all at a lower cost than disk solutions. The TS1160 offers high-performance, flexible data storage with support for data encryption. Also, this enhanced fifth-generation drive can help protect investments in tape automation by offering compatibility with existing automation.

  The TS1160 Tape Drive Model 60E delivers a dual 10 Gb or 25 Gb Ethernet host attachment interface that is optimized for cloud-based and hyperscale environments.

  The TS1160 Tape Drive Model 60F delivers a native data rate of 400 MBps, the same load/ready, locate speeds, and access times as the TS1155, and includes dual-port 16 Gb Fibre Channel support.
  

• Support of the IBM Linear Tape-Open (LTO) Ultrium 8 tape drive: The LTO Ultrium 8 offering represents significant improvements in capacity, performance, and reliability over the previous generation, LTO Ultrium 7, while still protecting your investment in the previous technology.
  
• Support of LTO 8 Type M cartridge (m8): The LTO Program introduced a new capability with LTO-8 drives. The ability of the LTO-8 drive to write 9 TB on a brand new LTO-7 cartridge instead of 6 TB as specified by the LTO-7 format. Such a cartridge is called an LTO-7 initialized LTO-8 Type M cartridge.
  
• Integrated TS7700 back-end Fibre Channel (FC) switches are available.
  
• Up to four library-managed encryption (LME) key paths per logical library are available.
  

October 2020 - Added support for the 3592 model 60S tape drive that provides a dual-port 12 Gb SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) interface for host attachment.