Sun Microsystems has unveiled what it claims is the industry's first one terabyte tape storage drive.

The Sun StorageTek T10000B offers 1TB of native storage capacity on a single cartridge for open or mainframe system environments.

Jason Schaffer, senior director of storage marketing at Sun, claimed that customers deploying the device could "cut data centre space requirements in half ".

The device provides second generation of media reuse and backward read/write compatibility, allowing customers that have standardised on Sun's StorageTek T10000 media family to gain double capacity on existing cartridges.

The Sun StorageTek T10000B Fibre Channel Tape Drive starts at $37,000 and will be available this month.