The vast amount of data being handled and protected by storage managers and media professionals increases each and every day.
To address this, storage managers are turning to tape as an easy-to-manage and simple way to address their storage needs and follow best practices.
As a result, the LTO Program Technology Provider Companies (TPCs), HP Corporation, IBM Corporation and Quantum Corporation, have announced that LTO technology has been helping to protect critical data assets for 12 years. According to a recent study by IDC, more than 4 million LTO drives have been shipped since the beginning of the program.
Another key milestone is expected to be met by the end of this quarter as Santa Clara Consulting Group anticipates that more than 200 million LTO cartridges will have been shipped to organizations big and small since the format’s inception. This translates into more than 80,000PB (uncompressed) of storage capacity worldwide.
The LTO Ultrium Generation 6 specifications, available August 2012, are expected to call for supporting a tape cartridge storage capacity of around 3TB native, more than double the compressed capacity of the previous generation, and tape drive data transfer rates of up to 200MB/s.
Since the introduction of the partitioning feature in the LTO Ultrium Generation 5 format and the public availability of LTFS software, tape is easier than ever to use and a key component not only for backup but also for long-term data retention.
