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IBM announces complete set of LTO-7 tape storage solutions

By Tony Pearson posted Fri October 09, 2015 03:26 PM

  

Originally posted by: TonyPearson


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It's Tuesday, and you know what that means? IBM Announcements! This week I am in beautiful Orlando, Florida for the [IBM Systems Technical University] conference.

This week, IBM announced its latest tape offerings for the seventh generation of Linear Tape Open (LTO-7), providing huge gains in performance and capacity.

For capacity, the new LTO-7 cartridges can hold up to 6TB native capacity, or 15TB effective capacity with 2.5x compression that for typical data. That is 2.4x larger than the 2.5TB catridges available with LTO-6. Performance is also nearly doubled, with a native throughput of 315 MB/sec, or effective 780 MB/sec effective capacity with 2.5x compression. The LTO consortium, of which IBM is a founding member, has published the roadmap for LTO generations to LTO-8, LTO-9 and LTO-10.

IBM will offer both half-height and full-height LTO-7 tape drives. All the features you love from LTO-6 like WORM, partitioning and Encryption carry forward. These drives will be supported on a variety of distributed operating systems, including Linux on z System mainframes, and the IBM i platform on POWER Systems.

The Linear Tape File System (LTFS) can be used to treat LTO-7 cartridges in much the same way as Compact Discs or USB memory sticks, allowing one person to create conent on an LTO-7 tape cartridge, and pass that cartridge to the next employee, or to another company. LTFS is also the basis for IBM Spectrum Archive that allows tape data to be part of a global namespace with IBM Spectrum Scale.

LTO-7 will be supported on the TS2900 auto-loader, as well as all of IBM's tape libraries: TS3100, TS3200, TS3310, TS3500 and TS4500. You can connect up to 15 TS3500 tape libraries together with shuttle connectors, for a maximum capacity of 2,700 drives serving 300,000 cartridges, for a maximum capacity of 1.8 Exabytes of data in a single system environment.

In addition to LTO-7 support, the IBM TS4500 tape library was also enchanced. You can now grow it up to 18 frames, and have up to 128 drives serving 23,170 cartridges, for a maximum capacity of 139 PB of data. You can now also intermix LTO and 3592 frames in the same TS4500 tape library.

For comptability, LTO-7 drives can read existing LTO-5 and LTO-6 tape cartridges, and can write to LTO-6 media, to help clients with transition.

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Comments

Archive User
Fri October 30, 2015 06:43 AM

Originally posted by: TonyPearson


Anton, The dates apply to all countries worldwide that IBM does business in, including Switzerland, but not Argentina. Recently, Argentina created special guidelines that we need to comply with separately, so there will be a small delay for clients in that country. So, order your LTO-7 drives today!!!

Archive User
Wed October 28, 2015 08:31 AM

Originally posted by: AntonBrauchli


Hi Tony Thank you for your fast Response. Is this Information also valid for Switzerland or just for US? Regards Tony

Archive User
Wed October 28, 2015 07:00 AM

Originally posted by: TonyPearson


Anton, The stand-alone drives are available now, as well as LTO-7 drives for the TS3500 library. Drives for the entry and midrange tape libraries are staggered between now and Nov 20. -- Tony

Archive User
Tue October 27, 2015 06:52 AM

Originally posted by: AntonBrauchli


Hi Tony Many thanks for sharing this. By when can we expect the LTO-7 drives to be orderable? Cheers Tony