LTO Ultrium Technology - Celebrates 12 Years of
Safe, Secure and Cost-Effective Storage
A little more than a decade ago, the storage world changed for the better
with the formation of the LTO Program. Today it represents one of the storage
technology’s most successful endeavors as it reaches new milestones of more than
4 million LTO drives and nearly 200 million LTO tape cartridges shipped since
the Program’s inception. This translates into more than 80,000 PB (uncompressed)
of storage capacity on LTO Ultrium tape worldwide.
That’s a lot of data. Here are a few things to consider:
1 Terabyte is all the X-ray films in a large technological hospital
10 Terabytes represents the printed collection of the U. S. Library of Congress
2 Petabytes represents the content of all U.S. academic research libraries
200 Petabytes is the equivalent to all printed material
5,000 Petabytes is all of the words ever spoken by human beings
It’s not only the continuous increases in capacity and data
transfer rates driving this success. The LTO Program designed an open platform
for compatibility among multiple providers, helping to enable options for
storage managers to keep costs low and systems simple. The technology has
delivered new, innovative features such as tape hardware encryption to help
secure data, WORM (Write Once Read Many) capability to address compliance needs
and media partitioning to open the door for new use cases and applications such
as the exciting Linear Tape File System (LTFS) to help make tape data access and
management easier.
The need for compatible, cost-effective tape backup and archive solutions
remains an important part of the IT infrastructure - and this is more important
than ever as the amount of data stored on tape continues to increase
dramatically. The LTO Ultrium Generation 6 format is designed to continue to
provide core functionality to enable broader use of the technology in a wide
range of solutions. Earlier this month the LTO Program announced plans to
release the specifications for LTO Ultrium generation 6 that are expected to
call for more than double the compressed capacity of the previous generation and
further increase transfer rates helping to protect more data assets while
providing open standards including backwards read and write compatibility and
cross vendor interchange.
Quick
Links:
LTO-5 Tape Media
LTO-5 Tape Drives
LTO Ultrium Tape Libraries