LTO Program announces availability of Ultrium format generation 6 technology Licenses.

LTO-6 Roadmap for growth and scalability

The Linear Tape-Open (LTO) Program Technology Provider Companies (TPCs) – HP, IBM and Quantum – today announced the availability of  licenses for the LTO Ultrium Generation 6 format. Keep in mind this is just the licensing of the Technology to manufacturers of LTO Ultrium products, and not an announcement of the availability, which would probably lean towards the 4th qaurter of 2011.

Plans for specifications for the Generation 6 tape cartridge include capacity of up to 8 TB*, almost triple the capacity over the previous generation, and tape drive data transfer rates of up to 525 MB per second*. Also included are features from previous generations of the LTO Ultrium format, such as encryption to help protect data in transition, Write Once Read Many (WORM) support to help address data security and compliance needs, as well as the dual partitioning feature, introduced in Generation 5, which when utilized by the Linear Tape File System specification can help provide faster data access and improve data management.

“LTO technology’s latest advancement was developed with the understanding that tape-based archiving continues to be a critical component of clients’ overall storage strategy,” said Chris Powers, directorof Nearline Solutions,HP. “LTO Generation 6 enables vendors to deliver storage solutions with performance benefits as well as increased data capacity.” 

Plans for LTO Ultrium 6 drive specifications include backwards-compatible read-and-write capability with LTO Ultrium 5 cartridges, and backwards-compatible read capabilities with LTO Ultrium 4 cartridges, helping to protect investments and ease implementation.

* Assuming a 2.5:1 compression with use of a larger compression engine history buffer