This week, availability of the next generation of LTO technology was announced – the LTO Ultrium format generation 9. Offering a 50% increase in capacity from the previous LTO generation, coupled with tape’s air gap protection against ransomware, unsurpassed reliability and lowest cost per terabyte, LTO-9 is well positioned to help organizations meet growing data demands. While LTO tape media has increased in capacity on a regular cadence since its first generation, LTO-9 enables a single tape cartridge to store 18TB of native data.
Full-height LTO-9 drives are almost two times faster than current hard disk drives, delivering uncompressed transfer speeds of up to 400 MB/second. Additionally, new features have been introduced with each generation, such as WORM, LTFS and hardware encryption. In fact, the new LTO-9 release is a catalyst to boost the performance and capacities of all Spectra tape libraries. Spectra Logic will integrate the ninth generation of LTO tape technology into its entire family of libraries to provide the lowest cost-per-gigabyte available to store massive amounts of date – all with proven enterprise-level reliability. For a closer look into the technology specifications of the new LTO-9, and how the technology boosts capacity and performance to enhance the storage and protection of data sets that are exponentially growing, click here.
Extending to generation 12, the LTO roadmap aims to increase capacity in each generation moving forward, providing a long future for tape users.
With the expanded capacity of LTO-9, the Spectra TFinity® ExaScale Tape Library is capable of storing one exabyte (one million terabytes) of uncompressed data in a single system, advancing the boundaries of tape technology. As the world’s largest storage system, the Spectra TFinity stores and protects data for such renowned organizations as Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, NASA Ames Research Center, and more.
