Quantum Corp., the data protection and Big Data management solutions provider, has announced availability of LTO-6 technology in its Scalar tape automation systems. Incorporating new LTO-6 tape drives that nearly double capacity and increase transfer rates by up to 43 percent over LTO-5 technology, Quantum’s Scalar i6000 enterprise tape library can now scale to over 45 PB, and a Scalar i500 midrange system over 2.5 PB. The higher capacities and increased performance further enhance the role of tape in providing long-term data retention, archiving and disaster recovery as an integral component of a broader tiered storage strategy.
In addition to Scalar i6000 and i500 tape libraries with LTO-6 technology, a full range of LTO-6 autoloaders, drives and media are also now available from Quantum. An LTO-6 supported StorNext AEL Archive will be available in early 2013.
Quantum’s LTO Ultrium 6 media cartridges support up to 6.25 TB of capacity and transfer speeds up to 400 MB/second (based on a 2.5:1 compression rate), substantially reducing the number of tapes that must be managed and data transfer time. With native hardware encryption, Quantum’s LTO Ultrium 6 tapes are also read/write compatible with LTO-5 cartridges and read compatible with LTO-4 tapes for investment protection.
Robert Clark, Senior Vice President, Data Protection, Quantum said, “Quantum continues to bring to customers robust end-to-end solutions for data protection which include tape, disk, virtualisation, and cloud services. The increased capacity and performance of LTO-6, along with other enhancements to Quantum’s tape portfolio such as LTFS, policy-based data integrity checking, improved density and high availability features, is enabling companies, including cloud providers, to evolve their tape use in exciting new ways. Tape’s low cost, power efficiency and extended reliability make it an ideal storage technology for archiving unstructured data and long-term retention of backup data.”