MORE THAN 80,000,000 CARTRIDGES SHIPED

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More Than 2,000,000 LTO Ultrium Format Tape Drives and 80,000,000 Cartridges Shipped
Format Continues Strong Upward Trajectory with Marketplace Acceptance, Green Advantages and Potential TCO Benefits for Users
SILICON VALLEY, Calif.–HP, IBM Corporation and Quantum Corporation, the three technology provider companies for the Linear Tape-Open (LTO) Program, today announced that the LTO Ultrium format has achieved yet another milestone that signifies the substantial market acceptance of the benefits that the tape format brings to the data center. Based on current data, the program has seen more than two million LTO Ultrium tape drives shipped worldwide since products based on the format first became commercially available in September 2000. In addition, LTO Ultrium format cartridge shipments have now surpassed a total of 80 million units since September 2000, an increase of over 30 million cartridges since the LTO Program’s last milestone announcement in September 2006.

“LTO tape products have been strongly embraced by business and government as an essential component of their backup and archiving infrastructure,” said Cindy Grossman, Vice President, Tape and Archive Systems, IBM. “The unique combination of performance, reliability, data protection, attractive total cost of ownership and low energy consumption has helped LTO technology continue to be a strategic choice of customers seeking to effectively address backup, archive, compliance and data security objectives.”

LTO generation 4 tape products are designed to deliver the backup and archiving features needed by today’s storage administrators, including high capacity, blazing performance and data protection features. With low energy consumption, LTO tape products also provide organizations with a green alternative for the data center. Studies have shown that tape-based backup and archiving solutions can deliver substantial TCO benefits compared to comparable disk-only backup approaches.1

“The considerable momentum of the LTO format shows strong and continuing acceptance of each LTO generation, and there’s no doubt that the release of generation 4 solutions will keep the LTO format moving forward,” said Sal Capizzi, vice president and senior analyst, Ideas International, Inc. “As we look at the hierarchy of storage managed by IT professionals, tape has a solid role in the data center for the foreseeable future, delivering needed backup and archive functions as well as cost savings in hybrid disk and tape backup systems. Tape brings exceptionally strong price/performance benefits while protecting data in a very cost-efficient manner, and the added data security provided by the native tape drive encryption capability of LTO-4 further increases the attractiveness of this format.”

LTO format generation 4 brings numerous advantages over the preceding generation, doubling physical storage capacity by delivering up to 1.6TB (assuming 2:1 compression) per cartridge. Transfer rates are also improved to allow generation 4 to reach speeds up to 240MB per second from up to 160MB per second in generation 3 (assuming a 2:1 compression).

As with LTO format generation 3, the new generation format also continues to offer WORM (Write-Once, Read-Many) functionality that provides cost-effective means for storing data in a non-rewriteable format to help address compliance needs. For additional security, LTO format generation 4 supports 256 Bit AES-GCM encryption capabilities at the tape drive level that are designed to enable the writing of encrypted data to the LTO Ultrium tape cartridge, helping to protect information on the tapes during storage and transportation.

LTO format generation 4 provides for drives with backwards-compatible read-and-write capability to store and retrieve data with the LTO format generation 3 cartridges, and backward read capabilities with generation 2 cartridges, to help protect the investment customers have made in LTO products. 

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September 10, 2007 at 10:07 AM