LTO-9 Archives - IT Jungle

LTO Cartridge – Drive Compatibility Matrix Not As Deep As You Think

March 27, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

A bunch of IBM i shops that must be in the process of upgrading their tape backup systems reached out to the techies that are part of the IT Jungle collective recently and expressed surprise or dismay when they thought that the LTO 9 tape drives they were looking at would be able to read tape cartridges written by LTO 7 drives or that LTO 8 drives would be able to read LTO 6 cartridges.

This, after all, has been the pattern that we have seen in the market for a long, long time. LTO 5 drives can read and …
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Sundry IBM Tape Subsystem Announcements

March 18, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

IBM has been shipping tape drives and tape libraries based on LTO-9 tape cartridge technology for nearly three years, which is why we think it is odd that last week we saw that the TS2290 machine now has a feature code to attach to IBM i or OS/400 systems.

In announcement letter AD24-0463, which is pretty terse as these things go, we see that there is a new feature code 9400 for the TS2290 tape drive, also known as the 3580 Model H9S. This appears to be just a feature code to allow for direct attachment of the TS2290 …
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Total LTO Shipped Capacity Up Slightly in 2022

May 24, 2023 Alex Woodie

More than 148 exabytes of compressed LTO tape capacity was shipped in 2022, a slight increase from the previous year, the LTO Program announced yesterday. The growth signals the continued relevancy of tape in a changing landscape marked by the predicted demise of spinning disk, the ubiquity of ransomware, and the continued growth of unstructured data.

Shipped LTO capacity reached a record high last year of 148.3 exabytes, a half-percent increase over 2021, according to the LTO Program, which is comprised of IBM, HPE, and Quantum. While unit shipments of tape cartridges declined slightly, capacity still grew thanks to more …
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Shipped Tape Capacity Up 40 Percent, LTO Program Says

April 27, 2022 Alex Woodie

LTO tape providers shipped 148 exabytes of total capacity in 2021, representing a 40 percent increase over the previous year, the LTO Program announced last week. The number shows how far data growth bounced back following the slowdown during the thick of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

The total amount of compressed storage capacity delivered to customers jumped from the previous record of 114 EB in 2019, according to the LTO Program. The shipped capacity figure fell to 105 EB in 2020, an 8 percent drop from 2019.

“Despite the significant business disruptions and uncertainty in 2021, LTO tape …
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New LTO 9 Gear, SAN Switch On Tap From IBM

November 29, 2021 Alex Woodie

IBM i shops facing a storage crunch may be interested in new tape products unveiled by IBM last week, including a new LTO 9 tape drive and LTO 9 compatibility for an existing tape autoloader and an existing tape library. Big Blue also announced LTO 9 compatibility for an existing storage enclosure, and a new 48-port c-type switch for connecting SAN environments.

IBM’s LTO fun starts with the IBM TS2290 SAS Tape Drive Model H9S, a half-height drive based on the new LTO 9 Ultrium specification. The TS2290 connects to hosts – including Power servers running IBM i, AIX, …
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Quantum to Help IBM Develop LTO-10

October 27, 2021 Alex Woodie

IBM and Quantum last week announced they have entered into a partnership to jointly develop the next generation of Linear Tape-Open (LTO) technology, LTO-10, which is currently under development and likely will come to market in 2024 or 2025.

The announcement was unusually terse in its wording. “Under the terms of the agreement,” Quantum stated in its October 19 press release, “Quantum will collaborate with IBM in its development of LTO-10 tape drives and media in order to accelerate time-to-market, capacity, and performance. The specific terms of the agreement are confidential and will not be disclosed.”

The fact that IBM …
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LTO-9 Drives and Cartridges Finally Get Out the Door

September 8, 2021 Alex Woodie

It’s been almost a year since the principals that make up the Linear Tape-Open (LTO) Program — IBM, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Quantum — announced the specifications for LTO Ultrium 9 (LTO-9) tape cartridge and drive. This week, the companies involved in the LTO Program finally announced that they’re getting LTO-9 gear out the door.

With 18TB native capacity and data transfer rates of 400 MB per second — both of which go higher with 2.5-to-one compression turned on — the ninth generation of the LTO format is expected to be adopted by organizations that need to store …
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LTO-9 Specs Reveal Compromise

September 16, 2020 Alex Woodie

The three companies behind the linear tape-open (LTO) tape standard released the specifications for LTO-9 last week. Those looking for a doubling of capacity over LTO-8, which was the plan according to the group’s product roadmap, will be disappointed.

Tapes based on the just-released LTO-9 specification will be able to store 18TB without compression and 45TB of data with 2.5-to-1 compression turned on, the LTO Program announced last week.

Those capacities represent just a 50 percent increase over LTO-8’s specifications. However, according to the LTO Program roadmap published in 2017, the group had been targeting 30TB of native capacity and …
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LTO-8 Tapes To Finally Ship in 4Q

August 26, 2019 Alex Woodie

A long-running patent dispute between Sony and Fujifilm has been settled and shipments of LTO-8 tape media will finally become generally available in the United States in the fourth quarter, the companies involved in the dispute have announced.

While IBM and other companies have been shipping LTO-8 drives for well over a year, customers around the world have not been able to use the LTO-8 tapes designed to work with them. That’s because delivery of LTO-8 tapes has been held up due to a patent infringement lawsuit raging in US Federal Court between Sony and Fujifilm, which are …
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