With the all the recent news about LTO-8 and a new media called LTO-7 Type M media, this blog series is intended to break down the details surrounding this new tape technology and provide some clarity to users looking to learn more. From drives to media, there are some significant changes from previous LTO generations, making LTO-8 and LTO-7 Type M the technology of the future.

LTO-8: What You Need to Know

What is LTO-8?
LTO-8 is the latest tape drive and media technology enabling:

• Double the capacity of LTO-7 – now 12TB native per tape and up to 30TB compressed (2.5x compression assumed)
• 20% higher throughput per drive – up to 360MB/s native and up to 750 MB/s compressed data. (Half Height drives will be at 300MB/s)
• Backward read/write compatibility to LTO-7
• New to LTO-8, a special LTO-7 Type M media is also available at 9TB native, providing users an intermediate option.

What about the tradition of reading/writing back one generation and reading back two? Read More

In its continuing effort to provide customers with the best technology on the market, Spectra Logic is now offering support for LTO-8 tape drives in all Spectra tape libraries, and the continuation of its LTO pre-purchase program. This program enables customers to receive the latest LTO tape drive technology, as soon as it hits the market. Spectra Logic provides pre-purchase customers with LTO-7 tape drives now, and upgrades their tape libraries with LTO-8 drives when they become available,with no additional purchase required. Read More

What is the difference between “data resiliency” and “data protection?” Both terms relate to digitally preserving organizational assets in the event of a natural disaster or data center corruption, however their means of doing so vary. The main discrepancy between the two really relates back to the cloud.

Data Resiliency
The term “data resiliency” refers to data’s ability to “spring back” in situations where it is compromised. In the cloud, data is resilient because it can be stored in a number of different locations. No one location is better than the other, availability is just improved by the more places data is stored, specifically in the event a location goes down or the data becomes corrupted. Users have access to data so long as the location they are storing their data at is accessible and the data isn’t compromised. If the one location goes down, users are directed to the second location. If all locations go down, then the organization no longer has access to its data. Read More

Portions of Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3, one of the world’s largest computing and storage companies, went offline Tuesday afternoon, impacting millions of companies across the world.

AWS provides cloud-based storage and web services for organizations looking for a virtual environment as opposed to the physical hardware infrastructure of on-premise solutions. For example, a post- production organization might store its videos, images or databases on an AWS server to be accessed, transcoded, and distributed via the Internet. Read More

In recent years, as cloud-based storage started to become more mainstream, it was anticipated that enterprise storage and other IT needs would be moving from onsite data centers to public cloud-based solutions. This has happened, but not quite in the way many predicted. Organizations have instead opted for a hybrid cloud approach — a combination of cloud-based storage and onsite data centers that allows businesses to carefully manage what data, or copies of data, stays onsite and what gets migrated to offsite locations and public cloud. Most enterprise organizations’ “cloud” storage infrastructures are actually hybrid clouds. Read More

By: Eric Polet

At Spectra Logic, we are focused on delivering cost-effective data storage and protection solutions for the modern data center, enabling customers to affordably store and protect all data. Once again we are pushing the boundaries of tape library speed and capacity with the introduction of TFinity® ExaScale Edition, the world’s largest capacity data storage system. This revolutionary product will provide organizations facing exponential data growth with the ability to reliably and economically store their data for as long as required. Read More