History (1999): FujiFilm Signs for LTO

For the moment, IBM seems to have a slight lead on Seagate and Hewlett-Packard, the 3 co-founders of the LTO consortium, along with Fujitsu, the 5th to invest in LTO (Ultrium) drive manufacturing.

There is also a lesser-known Colorado firm, Mountain Engineering II (reachable through its subsidiary, MP Tapes), currently a maker of 3490-compatible cartridges, which is working on its own Ultrium design.

On May 11, it was Big Blue who was first to demonstrate (and only demonstrate, no product announcement was made), in its Tucson, AZ lab, the possibility of storing 100GB of native capacity on a single LTO Ultrium cartridge. True, LTO technology is in large part derived from Magstar MP technology, developed, in fact, by IBM, and at the Tucson lab, as it happens. Furthermore, IBM affirms that it “plans to deliver Ultrium compatible products to key customers in 1999.”

Charlene Murphy, director, OEM marketing and sales, for the removable media storage solutions department of IBM’s SSD, mentions shining to OEM and distribution channels later this year.

Meanwhile, through its marcom manager, Tony Rush, based in Bristol, England, Hewlett- Packard announced that it would hip Ultrium drives for evaluation towards the end of the year, with a product announcement for the end of the year or beginning of 2000, and volume production in early or mid-2000.

IBM’s next step will be to submit its Ultrium cartridge to a new independent LTO testing facility selected by the LTO program, the Measurement Analysis Corp. in Torrance, CA. This is the firm that, after administering a certain number of tests, gives the green light to anyone who wishes to use the LTO name and logo.

After Emtec, Imation, Quantegy and Verbatim, Fuji Photo Film is the 5th media manufacturer to license Ultrium technology. Ultrium, which makes no secret of the fact that it’s ambition is to kill DLT, will now be supported by FujiFilm, the company that is 1 of 2 manufacturers of DLT cartridges!

The second is Maxell, but whether or not the latter firm will follow in its Japanese competitor’s footsteps by thumbing its nose at Quantum remains to be seen.

Even more bizarre, perhaps, is the sight of Benchmark among the LTO licensees, given that the company has been working on low-cost DLT drives with Quantum’s support.

At the same time, of course, it is true that the Ultrium cartridge is physically quite close to DLT’s cartridge (it’s the recording method that is different).

Finally, it’s worth noting that the Accelis format (weak capacity with excellent access times) has not yet managed to tempt anyone, apart from IBM (the IBM Magstar MP cartridge appears to be virtually identical to that of Ultrium).

Maybe the thing to do is to change the name of the LTO forum to “Ultrium consortium,” while IBM Magstar MP could just become IBM Accelis…

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 137 on June 1999 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.