LTO tape vendors announce LTO-9 and LTO-10
LTO tape vendors extend the LTO roadmap to include generations 9 and 10 with increasing capacity and transfer rates.
HP, IBM and Quantum Corp. recently extended the LTO tape
product roadmap to include generations 9 and 10. According to the LTO tape
vendors, LTO-9 will offer up to 18 TB of native capacity and LTO-10 will offer
36 TB.
Transfer rates are expected to increase at a larger rate than
previous generations. LTO-9 and LTO-10 will offer transfer rates of 708 Mbps and
1,100 Mbps, respectively. The current generation, LTO-6, provides a native
transfer rate of 160 Mbps, while LTO-7 will offer 315.2 Mbps and LTO-8 will
offer 472 Mbps.
Each of the new generations will include read-and-write
backwards compatibility with tapes from the previous generation. The new generations will also
continue to support LTFS, WORM functionality and encryption.
Some opinions on the announcement:
When LTO-6 was announced in 2010, it was noted they liked that
transfer rates were not increasing at such a rapid rate, as they had with
previous generations. "My only problem with tape is that it's too fast. When you
slow down, you get shoeshining; you wear out your tapes, you wear out your
drives, you get backup failures, etc.,"
Another said that while that is a valid concern, the LTO tape
transfer rate increases in the new road map are the result of higher densities
on the tape itself. "The drive head is reading or writing at the same speed but
the tape density is greatly increased so that same amount of tape is delivering
a lot more sequential data."
Another said that while disk is where IT organizations of
almost all sizes and topologies should base their data protection strategies,
the roadmap should inspire confidence among users for the future of tape
technology. "Even if you are looking to go to the cloud for long-term retention
of more than [three to four] years, your data may likely still be stored on
tape, just not managed by you."
Another agreed and said, "The roadmap adds certainty as much
as capacity. And that's key to people buying into long-term data storage and
retention."
"Tape has use cases even beyond long-term retention, archival
and data portability -- including some data recovery scenarios, and as the
longevity of LTO continues and the new usage scenarios like mountable
cartridges/libraries via LTFS gain awareness, vendors for backup, archive and
overall storage management will need to wake up to what modern tape looks like
and answer their customers' demands for additional tiers of storage beyond
disk."