Oracle Scales Up StorageTek LTO-5 Tape Libraries

There's been a lot happening in the LTO-5 tape world lately.

On July 26, Oracle revealed high availability and capacity enhancements to its Sun StorageTek tape libraries and drives.

On July 19, the LTO-5 Ultrium industry group, led by IBM and Hewlett-Packard, came out with an update on the overall industry that claims enterprises are purchasing digital tape at a continued high level for archiving purposes, despite the increasing popularity—and lowered cost—of spinning disk and cloud-based storage.

Back in June, high-end tape vendor Spectra Logic announced that it is getting into the LTO-5 market. Tandberg, Quantum, Maxell and Overland already are deeply enmeshed in the sector.

The LTO (Linear Tape-Open) Ultrium format is open-standards tape storage that is the greenest type of storage, since when storage is finished, the data is completely at rest.

LTO-5 media cartridges have a native capacity of 1.5 TB (3TB with 2:1 compression) and a native transfer rate of up to 140 megabytes per second (280 megabytes per second in compressed mode). The media capacity of LTO-5 is almost twice the capacity of LTO-4's native 800GB.

Now for the Oracle news. For starters, the company has beefed up its high-end StorageTek SL8500 Modular Library System to support LTO-5 tape drives and to include an increase in scalable capacity from 70,000 to 100,000 tape slots and redundant electronics.

Thanks to the new 1.5TB of native capacity and a throughput of 140 megabytes per second uncompressed, the enhanced tape libraries offer a 90 percent increase in capacity over LTO-4 drives and a 16 percent improvement in overall performance, Oracle said.

The new libraries are also more energy-efficient, consuming 48 percent less power when idle, Oracle said.

Oracle claims the StorageTek LTO-5 drive—coupled with the StorageTek SL8500 Modular Library System—makes this the first enterprise tape-automation system with up to 150PB of native storage capacity managed in a single tape library.

Oracle also said the StorageTek tape line works natively with Oracle Solaris, Enterprise Linux, Oracle VM, Exadata V2 server, Oracle Database 11g, Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g, Oracle applications and Sun servers, as well as other third-party mainframe and open systems products.