IBM today debuted a new tape drive that encrypts data in the drive itself. It's designed for markets that are increasingly regulated and concerned with data loss.

The TS1120 tape drive lets healthcare and financial services customers encrypt data at rest on tape from mainframe, Linux, Windows or Unix systems, thus eliminating the need for host-based encryption systems or separate appliances. The TS1120 drive can be installed in IBM and Sun/StorageTek tape libraries. It has a capacity of 1.5TB.

The TS1120 also supports key management, critical to managing and organizing tapes for retrieval. The IBM Encryption Key Manager for Java uses standard key repositories and encrypts data by application, system or tape library. The tape drive uses 3592 cartridges, which are available in read-write or write once, read many times (WORM) configurations for compliance.

Encryption support is available for z/OS, z/VM, i5/OS, AIX, HP, Sun, Linux and Windows platforms. The encryption capability is integrated with Tivoli Storage Manager.

The TS1120 competes with appliances from Neoscale, Decru and Vormetric and storage libraries the likes of Sun/StorageTek T10000.

The TS1120 tape drive with encryption capability starts at $35,000.