LTO Perseveres With Generation 7 Supposed to Be Available Later This Year

The LTO Program technology provider companies, Hewlett-Packard Development Company, LP, IBM Corp. and Quantum Corp., announced that the LTO Ultrium format generation 7 specifications are now available for licensing by storage mechanism and media manufacturers.

The new LTO-7 specifications more than double the tape cartridge capacity from the previous generation, including capacities of up to 15TB per cartridge when compressed. Large files will also transfer more quickly with tape drive data transfer rates that are up to 750MB/s with compression, which can translate to more than 2.7TB of data an hour per drive.

“With the release of LTO-7 we are again changing the economics of long term data retention and archiving,” said Chris Powers, VP data center development, HP storage. “High performance streaming and the demonstrated data integrity of LTO technology re-enforces the proof point that tape remains a very attractive match for long term storage requirements.”

Capacity and data transfer rates for LTO-7 are made possible by a range of technology advancements. The specifications include a doubling of R/W heads in a servo format to help achieve higher track density, which means that more data may be written to the same amount of tape within the cartridge. New formulation advancements provide stronger magnetic properties, helping to increase capacity.

“LTO-7 further solidifies the modern use case for tape in storage environments,” says Jason Buffington, senior analyst, data protection at ESG. “This new generation of tape technology will offer a high level of capacity at a low cost, and with LTFS capabilities, should be considered as a part of any tiered storage management plan.”

LTO-7 will continue to include features that were introduced in previous generations, including a partitioning functionality that allows users to present a tape-based file system with the use of LTFS. LTO-7 provides continued support for hardware-based encryption and WORM functionality. This helps ensure a balance of performance, capacity, compatibility and cost control supporting a range of security-rich and portable storage options for backup and archive that are easy to use and address a majority of storage needs.

More information on the LTO Ultrium generation 7 specifications will be available later this year.

In addition, an extended roadmap released last year outlines performance expectations for generations 8, 9 and 10. The new generation guidelines call for compressed capacities of 32TB for generation 8, 62.5TB for generation 9 and 120TB for generation 10.

The current generation of LTO technology – LTO-6 – supports tape cartridge storage compressed capacity of up to 6.25TB and tape drive data transfer rates of up to 400MB/s, and for over 1.4TB of storage performance an hour per drive.

For former LTO-5, it was revealed in January 2010 or 18 months ago, and the first LTO-5 tape drives from HP and IBM were launched three months later. It took three years to jump from LTO-4 to LTO-5.