• 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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• What’s the State of Your Backup?

  March 27, 2019 Alex Woodie

  If you’re like most IT professionals, you scarcely noticed that this Sunday, March 31, is World Backup Day. But now that you do know, you’re going to immediately do all you can to ensure that your company’s most valuable asset – its data – is sufficiently protected from the powers of destruction. The next question is: What does that mean for your IBM i server?

  As anybody who has ever lost an important document, database, or set of files knows, losing stuff hurts. And the more one loses, the more it hurts. That’s why it’s so critical to ensure that …

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• Cobalt Iron Targets IBM i with New VTL Offering

  November 14, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Cobalt Iron yesterday unveiled a new analytics-infused virtual tape library (VTL) solution that it says will optimize and bring IBM i backup and recovery operations into sync with the rest of the enterprise. The offering lets IBM i users back up their data to anywhere – including on-premise and the cloud backups, with automated replication in between — but without giving up IBM i-specific features delivered through existing tools like BRMS and native commands.

  Richard Spurlock founded Cobalt Iron five years ago with a plan to modernize backup and recovery. He saw that enterprises were spending too much time and …

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