Quantum Leaps to LTO-5

Data Center | News | Dan Berthiaume, Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Tags: data storage, Tape Drives

At a time when many IT organizations are struggling with backup and recovery, Quantum released what it calls the industry’s first tape products based on generation 5 specifications for the Linear Tape-Open (LTO) technology. This includes general availability of LTO-5 tape autoloaders, drives and media and limited availability of LTO-5 technology in Quantum’s Scalar tape libraries as part of an early customer adoption program.

According to Quantum, the new LTO-5 tape drives nearly double capacity and increase transfer rates by up to 15 percent compared to previously top-of-the-line LTO-4 technology, and enable media partitioning functionality. These enhanced capabilities, along with native encryption, look poised to enhance tape’s role in providing long-term data retention, archiving and disaster recovery as an integral component of a broader tiered storage strategy.

In addition to increased robustness and functionality, LTO-5 also offers cost savings. Ryan Duffy, Quantum automation product marketing manager, said LTO-5 provides the lowest cost per gigabyte of any storage technology available today. In addition, LTO-5 can provide energy efficiency savings due to less power consumption and lower cooling costs.

Quantum’s LTO Ultrium 5 media cartridges support up to 3 TB of capacity with transfer speeds up to 280 MB/second (based on a 2:1 compression rate), which the company says substantially reduces the number of tapes that must be managed and data transfer time. With native drive-based AES 256-bit encryption and WORM (write once, read many) technology, Quantum’s LTO Ultrium 5 tapes are designed to meet security and compliance requirements.

Comments (1)

Comments

Speed Increase and D2D2T

Sun, 2010-03-14 11:23 — Mark Campbell (not verified)

I think that it was a smart move not to increase the speed; although it appears that they're on track for making this kind of mistake with respect to LTO-6 due in a few years. They're on the top-end of the technology "S-curve" - what's occurring is that as they push the technology further they're running into the limits. I believe that while tape doesn't go away, that what you end up seeing are more D2D2T based systems that incorporate LTO-5 (and LTO-6) as the last tiered layer of storage. I write a little more about this at http://www.unitrends.com/...