Advanced Computing in the Age of AI | Friday, March 29, 2024

LTO Program Announces Extended Product Roadmap 

The LTO Program Technology Provider Companies (TPCs), HP, IBM and Quantum, announced today an extended product roadmap that includes two additional generations with even more capacity and throughput. The extended roadmap now includes generations 9 and 10. The new generation guidelines call for compressed capacities of 62.5 TB for generation 9 and 120 TB for generation 10.

“The production of six generations of drives and a well defined long term road map are key elements for the success of LTO,” said Joel Tax, Santa Clara Research Group. “With a road map showing four more generations beyond the current one, the LTO Program has shown commitment to innovation and support for the format”.

Transfer rates are expected to increase at a more significant rate than ever before. Plans include compressed transfer rates of up to 1,770 MB/second for generation 9 and a blazing 2,750 MB/second for generation 10.

“LTO technology continues to set the standard for cost-optimized backup and long-term archive storage,” said Chris Powers, Vice President, Data Center Development Unit, HP. “With the extension of the roadmap, organizations can expect advancements in capacity and efficiency that lower costs by reducing management overhead and provide the flexibility needed to scale for future growth.”

The two future generations will continue to provide the same conveniences and features that have made LTO technology the tape storage option of choice for millions of users. Each new generation will include read-and-write backwards compatibility with the prior generation as well as read compatibility with cartridges from two generations prior, helping to protect investments and ease implementation. Other features include Read Once, Write Many (WORM), encryption and partitioning – which allows for Linear Tape File System capabilities to enable easy file location and broader compatibility.

The current generation of LTO technology – LTO generation 6 – supports tape cartridge storage compressed capacity of up to 6.25TB, more than twice the compressed capacity over the previous generation, and tape drive data transfer rates of up to 400MB per second for over 1.4 terabytes of storage performance an hour per drive. As with previous generations, LTO-6 drives provide backward compatibility with the ability to read and write LTO generation 5 cartridges and read LTO generation 4 cartridges, helping to preserve media investments and ease implementation.

EnterpriseAI