Tape Storage Carves a Role in E-Business

LTO Early 2001

This month, IBM, along with LTO development partners Hewlett-Packard, Seagate Technology, and Fujitsu, have already begun announcing a variety of LTO tape drives; 28 other LTO licensee companies, mostly composed of tape vendors such as Ampex and Maxell, have started producing LTO standard tape cartridges for LTO products expected to arrive early next year, according to Zawatski.

"LTO creates a standard that will last for at least eight years and will lower a company's storage cost on tape to one cent per megabyte," Zawatski says.

The 4-inch-square LTO tape cartridges will store up to 100GB of information, and both the form factor and the stored data will be compatible with drives from any equipment manufacturer building to the LTO standard.

Big Blue's new Ultrium 3580 LTO tape drive, the cornerstone of the company's LTO product family, is a single-drive unit that can read 15MB of data per second, or 30MB of data if compressed. Starting at around $9250, the Ultrium 3580 can scale outward to as many as 2400 tape cartridges and beyond--a $42,000 configuration IBM is calling "Anaconda."

By early next year, IBM will begin offering the option of running LTO drives side by side with drives based on the competing DLT standard to allow for data migration to the LTO format.

Although competing solution DLT is not integrated into the LTO standard, it too is getting a face-lift.

Philip Triede, manager of product marketing for Super DLT tape at Quantum, says to expect DLT's upgrade to Super DLT by the end of this year--an upgrade that will nearly triple the tape's current storage capacity from 40GB to 110GB.

The eighth generation of DLT tape, a format with a considerable installed base, Super DLT will be backward-compatible to DLT tapes and drives dating back as early as 1994, according to Triede, who says a single-drive, single-tape Super DLT unit from Quantum will start at about $8000.

Representatives from both the LTO and DLT camps each agree that dispelling rumors that tape storage is too slow is a challenge.

To speed file access and maintain manageability in large tape arrays such as the Anaconda, both IBM and Quantum will also offer by year's end advanced "picker mechanisms," which are robotic arms that pull and insert tapes along the racks of tape drives, depending on the data being recalled.

Triede assures that in Quantum's testing, "while retrieving even the deepest file in a huge tape library, our access time is about two minutes."