• The Four Hundred
  • Subscribe
  • Media Kit
  • Contributors
  • About Us
  • Contact
Menu
  • The Four Hundred
  • Subscribe
  • Media Kit
  • Contributors
  • About Us
  • Contact
  • Ultrium Tape Drive Makers Ready LTO 6 Units

    July 16, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

    The Linear Tape Out (LTO) Consortium managed by IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Quantum started selling LTO 6 licenses last June, and now the first tape drives based on the spec are about to hit the market.

    According to a statement put out by the consortium, the first LTO 6 drives will hit the market in August, with the ability to store up to 6.25 TB of compressed data on a cartridge, double of the LTO 5 cartridge, with data transfer rates of up to 400 MB/sec on compressed data, a 42.9 per cent boost over LTO 5. If you want the uncompressed capacity and transfer rates for LTO 6 units, divide by two since the benchmarks assume 2:1 data compression (although depending on the nature of your data, you may do better or worse than this).

    In the past 12 years, more than 4 million LTO drives have shipped worldwide. Back in 2008, there were 2.5 million units in the field, so the rate of installation is actually accelerating in recent years–something you wouldn’t expect with so-called antiquated tape technology. By the end of the second quarter, storage industry watcher Santa Clara Consulting Group is projecting that over 200 million LTO cartridges of various capacities would have been sold worldwide, with a total of 80 exabytes of data capacity–that’s 80,000 petabytes, or 80 million terabytes–all told. By the way, that is 100 million cartridges sold in the past four years, which is double the rate of sales in the prior eight years. And considering that cartridges are getting fatter and fatter, that is an explosive amount of data growth on tape.

    Just as a reminder, back in 2008, the LTO 6 spec called for tapes with 6.4 TB of capacity and a data rate of 540 MB/sec. The LTO partners missed the capacity by a tiny bit and the data transfer rate by a larger margin. But, it is hard to project where a technology will be in any storage method. That’s pretty good, all things considered, and speed ups for CPU cores, memory chips, and disk drives have all but stopped, and tape is starting to slow down now, too. Moore’s Law doesn’t really fix speed problems any more, just capacity. And it is a big problem in all aspects of the IT racket.

    RELATED STORIES

    LTO Gen 6 Licenses Now Available

    LTO Tapes: Over 100 Million Served

    IBM Ultrium Media Pricing: Told You This Story Wasn’t Done

    IT Shops Consume 2 Million LTO Tape Drives

    LTO Tape Drive Sales Increased 15 Percent in 2007

    IBM Introduces Half-Height LTO 3 Tape Drive

    IBM Rolls Out LTO 4 Tape Drives and Libraries

    LTO Tape Drives a Smashing Success

    IBM Introduces New LTO 3 Drives and Libraries

    LTO 3 Tape Makes Its Way to Market



                         Post this story to del.icio.us
                   Post this story to Digg
        Post this story to Slashdot

    Share this:

    • Reddit
    • Facebook
    • LinkedIn
    • Twitter
    • Email

    Tags:

    Sponsored by
    UCG Technologies – Vault400

    Do the Math When Looking at IBM i Hosting for Cost Savings

    COVID-19 has accelerated certain business trends that were already gaining strength prior to the start of the pandemic. E-commerce, telehealth, and video conferencing are some of the most obvious examples. One example that may not be as obvious to the general public but has a profound impact on business is the shift in strategy of IBM i infrastructure from traditional, on-premises environments to some form of remote configuration. These remote configurations and all of their variations are broadly referred to in the community as IBM i hosting.

    “Hosting” in this context can mean different things to different people, and in general, hosting refers to one of two scenarios. In the first scenario, hosting can refer to a client owned machine that is housed in a co-location facility (commonly called a co-lo for short) where the data center provides traditional system administrator services, relieving the client of administrative and operational responsibilities. In the second scenario, hosting can refer to an MSP owned machine in which partition resources are provided to the client in an on-demand capacity. This scenario allows the client to completely outsource all aspects of Power Systems hardware and the IBM i operating system and database.

    The scenario that is best for each business depends on a number of factors and is largely up for debate. In most cases, pursuing hosting purely as a cost saving strategy is a dead end. Furthermore, when you consider all of the costs associated with maintaining and IBM i environment, it is typically not a cost-effective option for the small to midsize market. The most cost-effective approach for these organizations is often a combination of a client owned and maintained system (either on-prem or in a co-lo) with cloud backup and disaster-recovery-as-a-service. Only in some cases of larger enterprise companies can a hosting strategy start to become a potentially cost-effective option.

    However, cost savings is just one part of the story. As IBM i expertise becomes scarce and IT resources run tight, the only option for some firms may be to pursue hosting in some capacity. Whatever the driving force for pursing hosting may be, the key point is that it is not just simply an option for running your workload in a different location. There are many details to consider and it is to the best interest of the client to work with an experienced MSP in weighing the benefits and drawbacks of each option. As COVID-19 rolls on, time will tell if IBM i hosting strategies will follow the other strong business trends of the pandemic.

    When we say do the math in the title above, it literally means that you need to do the math for your particular scenario. It is not about us doing the math for you, making a case for either staying on premises or for moving to the cloud. There is not one answer, but just different levels of cost to be reckoned which yield different answers. Most IBM i shops have fairly static workloads, at least measured against the larger mix of stuff on the public clouds of the world. How do you measure the value of controlling your own IT fate? That will only be fully recognized at the moment when it is sorely missed the most.

    CONTINUE READING ARTICLE

    Please visit ucgtechnologies.com/IBM-POWER9-systems for more information.

    800.211.8798 | info@ucgtechnologies.com

    Article featured in IT Jungle on April 5, 2021

    Share this:

    • Reddit
    • Facebook
    • LinkedIn
    • Twitter
    • Email

    Admin Alert: Making Run the Same Run the Same On IBM i Access 7.1 On Windows 7 IBM Gives Killer Power System Deals Down Under

    Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Volume 21, Number 26 -- July 16, 2012
THIS ISSUE SPONSORED BY:

Infinite Corporation
ProData Computer Services
Townsend Security
Computer Keyes
WorksRight Software

Table of Contents

  • Windows On The (2012 And Cloudy) World
  • IBM i Mobile Native Apps Coming On Strong
  • Used Software Scores A Legal Victory In Europe
  • Mad Dog 21/21: Up Close And Personal
  • One More Power Systems Roadmap For The Road
  • Continued Caution Sways 2012 Worldwide Spending Re-Forecast
  • IBM Launches Single-Socket PowerLinux Server, Tweaks Power Systems I/O
  • Scott Klement Joins Profound Logic Staff
  • Ultrium Tape Drive Makers Ready LTO 6 Units
  • SAP Pre-Announces Record Q2 Revenues

Content archive

  • The Four Hundred
  • Four Hundred Stuff
  • Four Hundred Guru

Recent Posts

  • Query Supervisor Gives Database Engineers New Power
  • IBM Unveils New and Improved IBM i Services
  • 3 Takeaways from the 2021 PowerTech Security Report
  • Four Hundred Monitor, April 14
  • IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 23, Number 15
  • Big Blue Unveils Spring 2021 IBM i Technology Refreshes
  • Thoroughly Modern: Innovative And Realistic Approaches To IBM i Modernization
  • Guru: Web Services, DATA-INTO and DATA-GEN, Part 2
  • Back To The Future With A New IBM i Logo
  • IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 23, Number 14

Subscribe

To get news from IT Jungle sent to your inbox every week, subscribe to our newsletter.

Pages

  • About Us
  • Contact
  • Contributors
  • Four Hundred Monitor
  • IBM i PTF Guide
  • Media Kit
  • Subscribe

Search

Copyright © 2021 IT Jungle

loading Cancel
Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
Email check failed, please try again
Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.