LTO-8 Soon Available - IBM will Manufcture all LTO-8 Drives

Native 12TB and 360MB/s, 2.5X more with compression

To improve security measures and safeguard critical information, enterprises spanning a variety of industries have long relied upon technology whose origins go back more than 65 years.

The reasons why tape storage remains part of today's overall data management plan are:

• Cost

• The ability to keep pace with performance

• Tape's security capabilities

Being a physical media that can be kept under lock and key provides one layer of security. However, beyond locking away cartridges when not in use, encryption and WORM functionalities are providing users with deeper levels of data protection. Not satisfied with relying solely on security, tape engineers have also kept pace with performance.

According to the Tape Storage Council's State of the Tape Industry Report, tape data rates are expected to be as much as five times faster than HDD drives by 2025. This is great news for users whose archives include data from the IoT and big data analytics, as well as content from mobile and social systems, video streaming hybrid cloud workloads and traditional data center applications.

Introducing LTO-8

IBM is announcing its Linear Tape Open Ultrium 8 Tape drive (LTO-8), which doubles the capacity from its previous generation, shortens data access times by 20% and drives down costs below the half-cent per gigabyte barrier.

IBM's continued investment to increase performance that can help improve Companies ability to meet their security and regulatory requirements in tape technologies is important to their business. IBM's ongoing commitment to tape is providing more value than ever.

Available in 4Q17, LTO-8 joins a range of tape storage solutions providing clients with an economical choice in data preservation with increased functionalities. It maintains continued support for AME and AES-256 standard encryption, data partitioning and security key management while maintaining compatibility with LTO-7.

IBM Tape Storage - 65 years and counting

65 years ago our first marketed tape drive, the IBM 726, replaced a long-held and profitable punch card business. While a lifetime has passed since that time, it has not changed IBM's commitment to tape media as is evidenced by the recent tape milestone achieved by IBM and Sony. It demonstrated an ability to store up to 330TB of uncompressed data on a single tape cartridge the size of your hand.

With the latest IBM announcements, the future for LTO tape technology has never looked brighter.

Two years after announcing LTO-7 and five years after launching LTO-6, IBM reveals the first LTO-8 tape drives as well as a lot of libraries integrating the new format .

The main specs: capacity per cartridge of native 12TB (and 30TB with 2.5 to 1 compression) - twice more than LTO-7 -, data transfer does not follow the same pace with native up to 360MB/s for FH tape drives and 300MB/s for HH devices to be compared to 300MB/s for LTO-7.

The IBM LTO-8 tape drive also uses Statistical Analysis and Reporting System (SARS) to help isolate failures between media and hardware. SARS uses the cartridge performance history saved in the cartridge memory module and the drive performance history kept in the drive flash to help.