The T10000 tape drive has a throughput rate of 120MB/sec. -- four times that of its predecessor -- and it can encrypt data at the drive level. It has Fibre Channel and Ficon dual-port connectivity.

Charles Curran, a storage consultant at CERN, a particle physics research center in Geneva, said he plans to test the T10000 tape drives next year along with the new TS1120 tape drive that IBM made available last week in order to consolidate the center's data archive infrastructure. He predicts that the research center will have to buy at least 200 tape drives to back up a mind-blowing 15 petabytes (15,000TB) of data a year related to particle accelerator experiments.

"The bigger the cartridge, the better," said Curran, who uses a StorageTek SL8500 modular tape library system.

Curran said Sun has a slight advantage over IBM in that the throughput on the tape drives is 120MB/sec. vs. 100MB/sec. He isn't interested in the new Sun tape drive's ability to encrypt data, since the lab's data will be a series of random numbers collected from experiments where atoms are accelerated to velocities approaching the speed of light and then smashed against other atoms. The accelerator experiments are expected to go live in 2007.

CERN's StorageTek library currently houses 54 9940B tape drives with 200GB native capacity each. The new Sun/StorageTek technology would increase throughput four times and increase capacity two and a half times. While the added capacity and throughput will help the research center lower the overall storage footprint in a 30-year-old data center with little room to grow, it doesn't necessarily address CERN's biggest problem -- data restore time.