The LTO Program Technology Provider Companies (TPCs), HP, IBM and Quantum, announced on October 17, 2017 that the LTO Ultrium format generation 8 specifications are now available for licensing by storage mechanism and media manufacturers.
The new LTO generation 8 specifications again double the tape cartridge capacity from the previous generation, including capacities of up to 12TB per cartridge uncompressed. That is up to 30 TBs utilizing the standard hardware-based 2.5:1 compression technology. Large files will also transfer more quickly with tape drive uncompressed data transfer rates that are up to 360 MBs per second, which can translate to nearly 1.3 terabytes of data an hour per drive.
“Thanks to the ongoing commitment from LTO consortium members, LTO generation 8 technology will provide even more value than ever before. Modern tape has been optimized to support the big data workloads of today — and future IT trends — while improving businesses’ ability to meet their security and regulatory requirements,” said Calline Sanchez, Vice President Enterprise System Storage, IBM. “This will be critical to customers using LTO technology for media and entertainment, healthcare, video surveillance, hyper scale data centers, IoT and research, which rely on LTO technology to create a massive repository for nearline and long-term storage.”
“LTO generation 8 will continue to support multi-layer security capabilities, including hardware-based encryption and WORM (Write-Once, Read Many) functionality. The partitioning functionality that allows users to present an easy-to-use tape-based file system with LTFS will be also included in this generation.”
In one significant change from previous LTO generation technologies LTO-8 tape drives will only be backward compatible one generation, able to read and write LTO-7 tapes but not able to read LTO-6 tapes.
(for more information: LTO-8 specifications announcement)
(for more information: LTO-8-specifications announcement)