HP’s release of the next generation LTO Tape Drive (LTO-7), as a stand-alone unit and within autoloaders and libraries, will further increase the breadth of coverage of LTO tape drive. Tape remains the preferred method for off-site backup, with world-wide sales of tapes continuing to grow. In-turn, LTO has become the de-factor standard for tape, and HP has become comfortably the market leading manufacturer of LTO drives.
The key features of the new HP and Lynx LTO-6 drives include:
- Tape capacity of 6TB (uncompressed) – 2 x LTO-6
- Transfer speed of 300MB/sec (uncompressed) – 1.1TB/hr
- Increased maximum compression ratio from a typical 2:1 to 2.5:1 (data dependent)
- Includes features introduced with previous generations of LTO drives
- LTFS (linear tape file system) which provides the capability to “drag and drop” items to LTO tapes just as easily as you move files to a USB drive
- Encryption (hardware based)
- Support of Write Once Read Many (WORM) media for archiving
- Backward compatibility for 1.5 generations
- Writes to LTO-6 media
- Reads LTO-6 and LTO-5 media
Tape continues to be the preferred and logical medium for offsite storage / archive. It’s economical, portable, sizeable (in capacity), and reliable. The future of tape, as witnessed by the commitment of the likes of HP and IBM to future generations of LTO drives, and the continued growing take-up of tape by the market, is clearly determined. It’s is, and will be for some time, highly relevant.
Lynx has been involved with tape since the inception of the first DDS drives, and is well positioned to assess when, where and how it fits.
Please call us to discuss your backup / recovery requirements.
