April 23, 2014, Data Storage Innovations Conference, Santa Clara, CA—Shawn Brune from IBM provided updates on the LTO ecosystem. The need for archival storage technologies and media is growing, even as many IT organizations are trying to eliminate non-rotating or flash media.
The latest version of LTFS is 2.2, and the standard has been adopted by SNIA. The file format is still back compatible to older versions. The format is moving from a tape-only perspective to take its place in lots of industries, and may soon be included in cloud back-up and archive. The dramatic growth of data volume is driving many IT shops to consider tape as one more part of their storage arsenal.
Tape is still a viable media for longer term storage, and LTO has a projected lifetime of over 30 years. Tape functions have migrated from just backup in the '80's, to backup and archive in the '90's. Now, tape is getting new use cases as the backup functions moves to hybrid flash and HDD configurations and tape becomes easier to use with LTFS, which makes a tape look like a hard disk.
The tape format and the underlying drives have very high reliability and bit error rates, due to a read after write verify functions that is a part of the specifications. In addition, the drives from Generation -4 and up offer encryption in 256-bit AES in GCM mode. The tape technology provides a low-cost, high-volume storage medium that is portable, versatile, and interoperable across all vendor offerings.
The current version of LTO is version 6, which is slowly starting to ship. There is a slow transition from -5 to -6 as users move to the faster speeds and larger capacities. Generation 6 drives and media have a capacity of 6.25TB (assuming a 2.5:1 compression), and data transfer speeds of up to 400MB/s. Generation 5 delivers 3TB (assuming a 2:1 compression), and data transfers up to 280MB/s. Gen -5 is the first version to offer a new partitioning feature and Linear Tape File System.
Generation -7 is planned to be released next year and will offer capacity of up to 16TB (assuming a 2.5:1 compression), and a data transfer speed up to 788MB/s. The roadmap considers future growth and speed increases to address the growing data storage needs. The various versions of LTO are back-compatible two generations and vendors are still making older drive versions.
Although tape is still viable, many users are unaware of the latest technologies and storage capacities. To address this, the LTO organization has a number of white papers with use examples and ROI considerations on their site. See www.lto.org for more information.
