IBM has announced that market research firm IDC reported for Q3'08, that IBM was the number-one tape product vendor in the world, based on branded tape revenue. Overall, IBM captured 35.8 percent share of the total branded tape revenue global market for Q3'08.

The IDC report--"IDC Branded Tape Vendor Analysis Q3CY08"--marks the 22nd consecutive quarter that IBM has held the number-one position in worldwide branded total tape revenue. IBM was also the number-one vendor for branded tape revenue share for enterprise tape drives and enterprise tape libraries.

"Delivering a tiered storage architecture for our clients forms the foundation of the company's Information Infrastructure solutions," said Cindy Grossman, IBM vice president of tape and archive storage systems. For nearly six straight years, IBM has led the branded tape market, because IBM's tape system and tape virtualization offerings help address customers' needs, including long-term data retention, data protection, data security, energy consumption and total cost of ownership."

New IBM Products

IBM continues to deliver leading tape and archiving solutions to help clients with their Information Infrastructure needs. In the fourth quarter, the company introduced the IBM System Storage TS3500 Tape Library High Density Storage Frames models S24 and S54, which offer up to three times the capacity of existing frames in the same footprint. As companies seek more energy-efficient options for long-term archive, the TS3500 also reduces downtime during capacity upgrades, and allows for the archiving of data at rest, while helping to minimize power and cooling costs.

The IBM TS1130 enterprise tape drive and the IBM TS3500 tape library are also two of the products helping IBM's overall tape leadership. The TS1130 provides one terabyte of uncompressed cartridge capacity and up to 3.6 terabytes per hour of backup capability, while the TS3500 tape library high-density frames can store up to one petabyte of uncompressed capacity in ten square feet of floor space, helping clients reduce their overall total cost of ownership.

"Conserving resources like precious floor space while still maintaining access to critical data is a key objective of our data storage strategy. IBM's high density TS3500 tape storage frames help us do just that," said Vladimir Bahyl, tape service manager of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. "With the use of the IBM's TS1130 high-speed tape drives we can store up to one petabyte per high density frame, dramatically consolidating our storage environment."