Quantum Unleashes LTO 6 Tape Drives

January 8, 2013 Alex Woodie

Storage giant Quantum is now shipping LTO 6 gear, including drives, cartridges, autoloaders, and libraries. The company says it will support the latest super tape drive format with its storage virtualization software for big data, called StorNext, in early 2013.

Quantum announced the availability of its LTO 6 lineup in late November. At the heart of Quantum’s LTO 6 offering is a SAS-connected half-height drive. Quantum sells four general editions of this drive, including versions that can be installed in a tape library or autoloader; a rack; used on a standalone basis; or installed with a PCI Express host bus adapter (HBA).

Quantum is also selling its Scalar i6000 and i500 tape libraries pre-installed with LTO 6 technology. The larger capacity of LTO 6 cartridges push the total capacities of the enterprise-level Scalar i6000 library to more than 45 PB, while the midrange Scalar i500 now scales to 2.5 PB, according to the San Jose, California, company.

The LTO 6 specification, which was released last summer, supports a per-cartridge capacity of 2.5 TB of uncompressed data, and LTO 6 drives can transfer uncompressed data at 160 MB per second. The spec supports compression rates up to 2.5-to-1, which boosts capacity to 6.25 TB and data transfer rates to 400 MB per second.

Quantum also announced plans to support LTO 6 with its StorNext AEL Archive early this year. StorNext is a storage virtualization software product aimed at easing the storage and management of “big data” environments. The product uses a heterogeneous file system, and is used by clients in the media and entertainment industry to serve small clips of larger video files. Since it uses the LTFS feature of LTO, StorNext doesn’t support the IBM i OS.

Quantum is one of three founding members of the Linear Tape Open (LTO) Consortium, along with IBM and HP, also sells DLT and DAT/DDS tape drives.