Yesterday IBM announced a comprehensive set of tape storage offering incorporating the new LTO generation 7 tape drives. The new LTO 7 tape drives and media provide a native cartridge capacity of 6 Terabytes (15 TB with compression) up from 2.5 TB in the LTO 6 offerings and a data rate of 300 MB/second up from the 160 MB/Second for LTO 6. As with previous generations, the new tape drives protect customer’s media investment by having the ability to read and write to LTO 6 tape media, and reading LTO 5. The new LTO Gen 7 tape drives are incorporated across a broad set of platforms and libraries from entry, standalone half height SAS tape drives, to small tape libraries, to mid-size libraries, to large enterprise fiber channel tape libraries. Details on individual offerings can be found here IBM LTO announcement. All of the offerings show planned availability dates in 2015 with the first shipment dates varying from 10/23/2015 to 12/4/2015.
As customers wrestle with the growing demands to store, manage and preserve dramatically growing amounts of digital data, the new LTO 7 tape solutions provide a welcome relief. The higher capacity and performance of LTO Gen 7 provides the ability to cost effectively store very large amounts of archive, big data, video, and other information. By integrating with a broad range of tape automation, IBM customers can apply the new technology across a wide range of capacity and performance requirements.