Quantum Corp. announced availability of the industry's first tape products based on the generation 5 specifications for the Linear Tape-Open (LTO) program.

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. This announcement further extends Quantum's leadership in providing a range of tape- and disk-based solutions to meet different data storage, protection and accessibility needs. The new LTO-5 tape drives nearly double capacity and increase transfer rates by up to 15 percent over LTO-4 technology, and enable media partitioning functionality. These innovations, along with native encryption, enhance tape's role in providing long-term data retention, archiving and disaster recovery as an integral component of a broader tiered storage strategy.

"Tremendous growth in unstructured data, rich file formats from new digital technologies and requirements to hold on to that content for longer periods are stressing storage infrastructures across all markets," said Janae Lee, senior vice president of Marketing for Quantum. "In the face of these challenges, customers are increasingly looking for solutions that leverage the respective advantages of both disk and tape. Our 'first-to-market' position in LTO-5 is testament to Quantum's continued commitment to providing data protection and management products that effectively address evolving market needs."

Innovations with LTO-5 technology strengthen the economical advantages of tape in terms of lower cost and power consumption in tiered storage applications. Compared to the previous generation, LTO Ultrium 5 tapes have nearly twice the capacity in the same footprint, thereby providing a much lower cost per gigabyte of data storage. Customers also benefit from greater energy-efficiency savings with LTO-5 because of 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), substantially reducing 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.

A new feature introduced in LTO-5 technology is the capability to partition LTO-5 media, providing enhanced file control and data indexing. This feature enables nearline applications to index data on tape, facilitating data access and archiving on tape. Additionally, LTO-5 technology is read and write compatible with LTO-4 cartridges and backward read compatible with LTO-3, which protects customers' investments and simplifies data migration projects.