IBM introduces the eight generation of Linear Tape Open (LTO) tape drive technology, with corresponding support in all of the IBM tape libraries.
Fellow blogger Jon Toigo, of Drunkendata.com fame, came to Tucson to interview Lee Jesionowski, Ed Childers, Calline Sanchez, and me about this. Check out the various segments on YouTube or his website.
The LTO-8 cartridges are not yet available, but when they are, they will hold 12 TB raw capacity, or 30 TB effective capacity at 2.5-to-1 compression ratio. The new drives are N-1 compatible to read/write LTO-7 cartridge media.
Previous generations also supported reading N-2 generation tapes, LTO-8 breaks from that tradition and will not support LTO-6 cartridges at all.
LTO-8 comes in both "Full Height" (FH) and Half-Height (HH) models. The FH models can transfer data at 360 MB/sec (or 900 MB/sec effective at 2.5-to-1 compression), and the HH models at 300 MB/sec (or 750 MB/sec effective at 2.5-to-1).
LTO-8 supports IBM Spectrum Archive and the "Linear Tape File System" (LTFS) tape format for self-describing long-term retention of data.
To learn more, see [IBM 7226], [IBM TS2280], [IBM TS3500], [IBM TS4500], [IBM TS3100 and TS3200], [IBM TS3310], [IBM TS4300] press releases.
For deployments of IBM Cloud Object Storage on premises, IBM adds two new features: Compliance Enterprise Vaults and Concentrated Dispersal mode.
Compliance Enabled Vaults, or CEV for short, are the latest in a series of NENR storage solutions. Objects written to CEV cannot be deleted or modified during a retention period.
(See my 2007 blog post [What Happened to CAS] to see how far we have come in 10 years.)
Compliance storage has come under many names. For tape and optical media, we had "WORM" for Write-Once, Read-Many. For disk-based storage, we had "Fixed-Content" or "Content-Addressable Storage". For file systems, we had "Immutable Storage".
Fortunately, the clever folks who crafted the SEC 17a-4 law came up with an umbrella term: "Non-Erasable, Non-Rewriteable" (NENR) that covers all storage media, from WORM tape and optical, to tamperproof flash, disk and cloud-based solutions.
The other major change is "Concentrated Dispersal" mode, or "CD mode" for short. Erasure Coding works best when data is dispersed across three or more sites. When this happens, you can lose all of the data at one site, and still have 100 percent access to all data from the other locations.
IBM's "Information Dispersal Algorithm", or IDA for short, scattered slices of data across many servers. Great for high availability and performance, but often meant that the minimum deployment was 500TB or greater.
Not every organization is ready for such a large purchase. Some want to just [dip their toe in the water] with something smaller, less expensive. Well IBM delivered!
The new CD mode means that instead of one slice per Slicestor node, you can pack lots of slices on each node. Each slice will be on distinct disk drives, for high availability.
Entry-level configurations now can be as little as 72-104 TB, across 1, 2 or 3 sites.
To learn more, see [On-Premises Cloud Object Storage] press release.