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Congratulations to Spectra Logic for completing 30 years in business. Not an easy thing to attain in any sector, IT or otherwise.
The Colorado-based enterprise tape library company announced June 7 that it is moving into a new market by shipping LTO-5 [Linear Tape Open] drives and LTO-5 media cartridges in its T-Series libraries. Quantum, IBM, Fujitsu and Sony have been the market leaders in LTO, so Spectra Logic — a successful maker of high-end tape storage [mostly robot-operated] systems for television stations and large enterprises, will have some stiff competition.
The fifth generation of the LTO-type tape machine is “attractive to IT organizations that either use or may be planning to use LTO tape technology in terms of feeds and speeds that follow the typical high-technology, evolutionary path of providing ‘better, faster, cheaper’ capabilities,” analyst David Hill of Mesabi Group wrote in his blog earlier this year.
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 140MBps (280MBps in compressed mode). The media capacity of LTO-5 is almost twice the capacity of LTO-4’s native 800GB.
Spectra Logic claimed that its version of LTO-5 combined with the small footprint and low power requirements of its own tape libraries provides “the best storage density and energy efficiency available in a tape library today.”
Company claims are always debatable, but what’s certain is that Spectra Logic has a 30-year history of providing tape systems that customers keep buying, even though spinning disk storage keeps threatening to swallow up the whole sector.
Spectra’s T-Series tape libraries are available with LTO-5 drives and media starting today. The new LTO-5 drives include a dual port, native 8 Gb Fibre Channel interface that is compatible with conventional 2Gb and 4Gb fibre channel switches and host bus adapters.
LTO-5 drives are fully compatible with Spectra’s BlueScale Encryption with key management, Spectra’s MLM, drive-level AES-256 bit encryption key generation and WORM media capabilities. Pricing for a T50e with one half-height LTO-5 drive and 10 LTO-5 media slots begins at $10,500.