IBM, Sun both lay claim to developing first 1TB tape drive

On Monday, Sun announced its StorageTek T10000B Fibre Channel-based tape drive. With a storage capacity of 1TB, it comes in at twice its previous top capacity of just 500GB. Interestingly, IBM followed-up Tuesday to release the "world's first" 1TB tape drive in its System Storage TS1130. As analyst George Crump noted, "I was kind of laughing that two people were claiming to have the first at the same time."

As many companies tend to prefer announcing new products on Mondays, it is not inconceivable that IBM quickly pushed an announcement that originally was scheduled for a later date forward. This will help explain the fact that IBM will only be shipping its drive in September, compared to Sun's availability in the latter part of this month.

For more information on this report:
- check out this NetworkWorld article