Sun announces enterprise tape drives

Businesses that are running at the limits of their tape drive capacity will soon have another upgrade option with Sun’s new StorageTek T10000 drive.

The device can store up to 500 GB of uncompressed data on tapes. This isn’t too impressive, but Sun promises that the capacity per cartridge will be much greater in the future. According to a press release, "future generations of the T10000 tape drive will feature expanded capacity up to one teraByte uncompressed on a single cartridge."

One of the main selling points of the T10000 is a fibre channel interface that speeds data through at 120 MB per second. Imation has been tapped as the media provider. The technology doesn’t come cheap : Prices of the drives will begin at $37,000. There is no word on how much the tapes will cost.