LTO-9 Available From Spectra Logic

Spectra Logic Corporation announced the availability of the ninth gen of LTO technology for its family of tape library solutions, including the Spectra TFinity ExaScale, T950, T950v, T680, T380, T200, T120,T50e and Spectra Stack.

These libraries support LTFS, WORM, hardware encryption, and Spectra’s Media Lifecycle Management. Certified with all major ISV packages, integrate with Spectra’s BlackPearl Object Storage Platform, enabling users to create a multi-storage ecosystem for maximum storage, access and preservation of data to disk, tape and cloud.

“The industry is seeing a resurgence of tape storage deployments by organizations with growing data repositories, even if they already have disk and cloud, because tape provides the greatest storage capacity at the lowest cost per terabyte with exceptional reliability,” said Christophe Bertrand, senior industry analyst, ESG. “Tape technology, such as LTO-9, also offers unmatched air gap protection vs. ransomware, enabling organizations to protect their data offline and beyond the reach of malevolent threat actors.“

The ninth gen of LTO (Linear Tape-Open) tape technology is designed for greater storage density and speed, providing up to 18TB of native capacity per cartridge (up to 45TB with compression) surpassing the capacity of LTO-8 by 50%. Full-height LTO-9 drives deliver uncompressed transfer speeds of up to 400 MB/second, almost 2x faster than current HDDs. In addition, LTO-9 drives are backward compatible with LTO-8 tape media, allowing users to R/W LTO-8 media.

“Today’s news of LTO-9 tape availability confirms the extensibility of this popular open format that was developed more than 20 years ago,” said Nathan Thompson, CEO and founder. “With each gen, new features have been introduced, such as WORM, LTFS and hardware encryption. We recently made software updates for our installed base of thousands of LTO libraries to enable customers to add or upgrade to LTO-9. And since we are the first to offer a tape library – the TFinity – that can store an astounding exabyte of native data with LTO-9 drives and media, we couldn’t be more excited about the long-term prospects of LTO tape technology for our customers.“

The World’s Largest storage System with LTO-9
Designed to meet demanding backup, archive and data protection requirements, the TFinity addresses data growth in such industries as HPC, scientific research, M&E, cloud storage, education, healthcare, finance and traditional IT. It provides organizations with capacity, performance, reliability and scalability at a much lower price point than other storage options.

Highlights of TFinity Include: 

• Tri-Media – The only tape library to support 3 tape technologies in the same library (LTO, IBM’s TS 11xx and Oracle’s T10000)
• Scalable from 3 to 45 frames, over 56,000 slots, with bulk load capability
• Advanced dual robotics for higher performance and greater reliability
• Maximum compatibility to work with any third-party software package
• Custom front library panels that showcase customer brand

Spectra LTO-9 Certified Tape Media
Spectra extends its Certified Media process to support and improve the characteristics of LTO-9 media. Certified Media undergoes an inspection and verification process to ensure that it is the highest possible grade of tape media on the market and comes with a lifetime guarantee. Additionally, Media Lifecycle Management ensures the safety of data by providing continuous assessments on more than 40 different metrics throughout the life of each tape. Detailed reporting mitigates any media problems and restore issues, allowing users to copy and move data onto new tapes should it be necessary.

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