Gregory Tad Kishi

The IBM Virtual Tape Server: Making tape controllers more autonomic

The IBM Virtual Tape Server provides a revolutionary tape storage solution that emulates tape drives using a disk cache, providing up to 256 virtual tape-drive images and stacking the virtual tape volumes onto a maximum of 12 physical tape drives. The high ratio of virtual to physical drives, combined with the stacking of virtual volumes, provides tape storage that is both cost- and space-efficient. Existing IBM products are used as microcode building blocks to provide the core functions of the virtual tape server. These core functions are integrated into a reliable, high-performance storage subsystem by autonomic computing controls.

The IBM 3495 robotics and vision system

The IBM 3495 Tape Library Dataserver is an automated tape library that consists of one to four IBM 3490 Magnetic Tape Drive Subsystems, a Library Manager computer, a storage enclosure, and a tape cartridge accessor. The accessor incorporates a combination of IBM and OEM robotics and vision systems with application programs and special fixtures that provide automatic teaching and updating for up to 18,000 cell locations in the library. Command queueing allows continuous robotic motion, removing the performance penalty of communications with the Library Manager computer. The application program written for the vision system compensates for label tilt and spatial translation. A neural network with special filters ensures the quality of the labels read.